Double post cause first post was mostly aimed at GavJ and was ninjaed by GoblinCookie.
GoblinCookie, I disagree with GavJ's pure rational agent economic model of everything (sorry for one sentence summary), but I still think economic modeling is a good way to go in general. The way you describe it, your civ is entirely irrational to the point of unrealistic it seems...
All rational economic decisions are ultimately based upon irrational intrinsic value. In the final analysis 'reason' fails because everything reduces in the end to arbitery values with no rational foundation except in politics/ideology. This in my book means that economics is simply applied politics, all economic theories are actually political doctrines in disguise.
To the civilization the outposts are not merely an 'investment'. They are like your children, you do not consider them as a means to your own end, you consider them ends in themselves. Since this clashes however with other ends we get a compromise, we will send a certain number of caravans to a far-flung outpost but there is a limit to how much they are willing to send.
I just don't see this as realistic behavior. Rulers make irrational choices, but they are not that irrational.
You the player have modelled irrational behavior on the part of the civilization. Irrational behavior is right at the bottom of the economic pile as already explained.
The far-flung outpost is an instrinsic good, it is essentially an expenditure that they justify because holding that outpost is valuable in itself to them. Perhaps expansion is an end in itself? Perhaps the island is sacred to them in some way and needs to be kept of the hands of others that will defile it?
And you miss mine and GavJ's points about ways of modeling this. It doesn't have to be just "fluff". You could represent it with a linear economic "strategic value" or you could represent it with "Political capital" but I see no reason to leave it as backstory fluff.
Within the context of the scope of this thread it is just fluff. Outside of the scope of this thread all sorts of things are possible with the idea, as GavJ latest derailment posts have demonstrated.
Even if the economic incentives are skewed, you could still represent with "strategic value". If the Mountainhomes is outright behaving irrationally, you should still model that somehow and not just leave it as an absolutely certain event.
The problem is that all settlements have to have greater than 0 strategic value or else they would never have been created. Since sending caravans is a requirement to keep the settlements in the fold, unless something reduces the strategic value below 0 they will always send caravans end if it is at a loss.
I'm NOT saying they should never get anything ever. See the explicit examples in my previous post -- it's just that you only get a caravan every once in awhile, once you're expected to have built up enough excess goods and needs to make the journey worthwhile. It's just a caravan every 4-5 years perhaps for a truly remote hole in the ground, instead of every 1.
In my experiance unless you can buy weaponry in the first year you will not live to become an economic power in the first place. Self-sufficiancy is only possible if you have wood and metals easily available in your starting location, which is a very big if.
It is quite possible though that you will end up getting a caravan every 4 years, much of it depends upon how much the 'royal caravan' has to service other outposts and just how far you are away from the royal residence.
It makes no sense for a civilization to have a single caravan running around everywhere, either from a realism or a gameplay point of view. Are you using this as an exaggerated example? if so, it is not clear.
The caravan represents the total cost the civilization is willing to spend on the instrinsic value of their outposts. There is only one caravan because there is a limitation of how much they are willing to spend. This represents quite nicely the existance of political intrinsic values but also the limitation of how much they are willing to spend on them.
No, again, if you'll shift your attention to my previous post (which I'm getting the feeling you didn't notice before writing this), there are all kinds of possible "backstories" for a given fort. SOME forts are nearby, heavily supplied, extensions of the mountainhomes basically. Other ones are medium far and might get caravans every year. Some are military and strategic in nature. Some might be religious or backed by guilds. Others might be exploratory "deep space" probes, essentially, high risk high reward gambles.
All of them have initially greater 'strategic value' than 0. That means political intervention will ensure they get service regardless of normal economic factors. So within the
context of the thread it is fluff; why the outpost is valuable is not important, since if it had no value it would have never been created.
Outside of the context of the thread, it is a very cool idea and would add much to the game.
You are kind of ignoring a lot of good, detailed examples and cases, many of which covered the issues you are raising.
I suppose I am. They were largely redundant within the scope of this thread. The problems they were supposed to solve have already been solved in a far simpler manner.
If it is plausible IRL for a community that is self sufficient to not care about trade then it should be plausible in game, that simple.
The possibility of complete self-sufficiancy is kind of threatening to the 'mountainhomes' however. They do not want you to end up completely self-sufficiant, because what reason would you then have not to become completely independant of them?
They would of course continually pester you with different types of goods until they find something they can make you dependant upon.
An economic model provides a implementable generalized way to get variable, creative, logical, and playable procedurally generated results. A lot of your suggestions are easy to implement and playable, but make no sense from a realism/logical perspective (1 caravan going everywhere?), or they are realistic but you don't explain how to implement it.
The 1 caravan I was refferring is the caravan that is 'belongs' to the monarch of your civilization. As I have already pointed out, caravans are limited to the number of nobles in a settlement. The king however has a special caravan that acts according to a more political logic than other caravans do.
The realism comes from the sense of civilization wide responsibility that the monarch alone has. The monarch seeks to look after all the far-flung outposts solely because they are part of the civilization and keep them in the fold. But that is not all that the caravan does.
It automaticly goes to all settlements of that civilization that are NOT in any other (dwarven) trade routes. It also routes through if possible other settlements, trading with all of them along the way. This means that it is not even necceserily making a loss overall, more subsidising the journey towards the final destination with profits made along the way.
In all other respects the caravan is just like any other. If nowhere out there is not getting any caravans normally, it is will trade completely according to completely normal basis.
Utilitarianism doesn't require philosophy, it's a natural condition of anybody who actually gives a crap about their country to do things that are overall good for it and avoid things that will ruin it. Just common sense.
Sure, I'm with you that sometimes people don't use common sense. But that shouldn't be the rule -- we'd be extinct if it was the rule. I'm all for simulating irrationality for flavor, but do it by simulating the hyper-rational choice, and then modifying it with a dice roll if you want. it's cleaner, easier to code, and more mod-friendly than coding irrationality at the core.
Rationality is a tricky thing. The problem is that what is the value of say the Falklands Island inherantly. Who decides? Both Argentina and Britain value them enough to spend millions on a war, but they are of little value in the sense of resources that the centre gets from them. Madness you think, but what is the value of anything? If you consider you outposts inherantly valuable, you are willing to expend a certain amount even if they produce little value to you.
Your basic 'rational' ideology is actually hugely destructive in practice. Because outlying areas are considered only extrinsicly valuable by the centre, they are ruthlessly exploited by said centre creating a situation by which their development is cannibalised in order to further develop the centre. Essentially the ultimate end of your reason are such things as the American War of Independance and arguably the Third World in general.
It's not fluff - it dictates a set of very important and consistent algorithms for gameplay that goes with that story consistently.
If you're at the gulag, for instance, you ain't gettin' any care packages (no caravans, or if there are any they only carry necessary tools for your labor sentence and stuff). The game might also mandate certain activities for you to accomplish as your hard labor, and the diplomat will stop by to check. If you're falling behind, they might decide you are now a leper colony instead of a gulag regarding your next shipment of prisoners... or something.
Blah blah etc. etc. Any backstory = a whole suite of gameplay conditions that match up with it. Different types and requirements for caravans, different diplomatic demands and options, different responses from the mountainhomes or your merchant employers for insubordinance, different numbers of embark points, different ongoing charity or tribute demanded.
Yes but all of it is beyond the scope of this thread. The caravan will arrive, because otherwise your settlement will simply drift into either isolation or extinction, whether it was originally meant as a prison camp or not.
Yes there may be special conditions or demands, but all that belongs in a seperate thread.
So dwarves, if they were at home, would be twiddling their thumbs not producing or defending anything (a very distinct cost - one of the larger ones)?
And they would be using up ammunition defending against highwaymen at home?
And they would be hiring boats and guides and paying ferrymen at home?
And they would be hoarding multiple wagonfulls of your stuff and stopping you from using it for months, if they were at home (clothes in the caravan = not available to be worn, etc.)?
And they would be spending bribes for local hill tribes to let them pass, at home?
And they would be out in the open, undefended, exposed to dragons and husks and goblins and everything else, at home (cost of life per day = much higher)?
The costs are not great because it is likely possible to engage in plenty of trade en-route to our destination. I was never working on the assumption that everything our caravan did was travelling to far-flung outposts. You are subtracting from your profits, not making an overall loss. And in the end not even so, in the long run you may end up making a profit from the outpost too.
Um yes there is. You can look up exactly where it is in legends. It's the capital founded city at year 1 for that civ. I don't remember whether it can move or not later on.
This might explain a lot of the confusion in the discussion so far, since several suggestions are based on the location of your civ's mountainhome.
By that definition my 'mountainhome' was Oiledcat and that was destroyed centuries ago by a monster. You also continue to get caravans from the mountainhome if the rest of your civilization is completely extinct. So no, the mountainhome the caravan refers to is clearly *not* a physical location.
Please read prior posts, don't just click through when it says "something has posted in the meantime."
This is not obvious, since there is no reason to bring a wagon with you to ask people questions about stuff.
I had like several paragraphs about how we can resolve most of the arguments in the thread by simply having diplomat-only, MUCH cheaper missions, with a diplomat and a gaurd on horseback with no wagons. Costs vastly less (thus being more economically realistic) and takes care of all of your nationalistic diplomatic desires and information and news and taking caravan orders, etc. So it should make both of us happy.
As already explained, they are not merely trying to keep contact they are also trying to make you in some sense dependant upon them. Because they are trying to tie you to use them economic dependancy. A diplomat who offers you nothing is not going to motivate anyone not to do a US declaration of independance.
The goods you will have will be the goods that the caravan has on it. That generally means you will be buying whatever goods that were bought by the caravan enroute and those from the monarch's residence where the caravan is based. The game engine autonomously decides what will be for sale based upon the route it is following, not any pre-made script based upon how valuable you are.
You inform them (as at present) what you want to get in the future and the game will inform all the caravans in the game what your demands are. Once another dwarf caravan arrives, you no longer get any special treatment, the royal caravan will only visit you if it makes economic sense to do so.
Do you play Dwarf Fortress? Nowhere, far-flung or not, "desperately needs" caravans in this game. In fact, it is not even all that difficult to bring a single pick and anvil with you, nothing else, and zero skills in an evil glacier and still make a prosperous fort without ever talking to a caravan (collapse some ice into water, go to caverns. Profit).
I sympathize with your claim that the mountainhomes would want to keep tabs and keep in touch with their settlements. But again, that can be accomplished with lone diplomat + guard on horseback, for a fraction of the time and cost of a caravan, thus making it more realistic if/when a caravan is not being profitable or strategic.
It would also actually be much safer too! Horses can outrun almost anything. Those diplomats would not very often be dying when visiting your fort next to ambushers or on the road.
I do play Dwarf Fortress and from my experiance unless an embark site has both wood and weapon-grade metal (or perhaps weapons-grade metal and coal) self-sufficiancy at the most basic level is not possible for any length of time.
I lost my first fortess because I could not understand how the trade system worked, thus could not acquire any weapons, I could not find any weapons-grade metal (tin was all I could find) and then the goblins killed me.
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Topic: more challenging trading (Read 9874 times)