You don't understand economics. The fact that you interpret all of economics as stealth-politics is more proof of your lack of any knowledge or understanding of it (if you knew economics better, you would know which parts are fundamentally true, which parts are debatable, and which parts are politically biased). Anyway, the OP and the few posts after that explicitly asks for economics not to be treated as an issue in this thread to avoid cluttering the thread.
I am going to ignore your discussion of quotas because we already explained why such a system won't work and actually address your unaddressed point:
Yet they discuss nothing but economics in this thread Scruiser, it is clearly the issue being discussed. It has never been aduequately demonstrated why such a system won't work, the reverse is actually true; the lack of quotas will break the system horribly.
The neccesity of quotas is why we have now have something called a SEED LIMIT; the ability to stockpile surplus seeds infinitely ended up breaking the game. If we do not put a solid cap on demand stockpiling we will end up with the possibility of stockpiling to infinity and then the game will start to break at a hardware level, let alone economically. We definately need to limit stockpiling behaviour, if we do not build this into the system at core we end up having to impose it from above arbitrarily.
And The reason I say that all economics is stealth-politics is because it is true; all existing economic theories have repurcusions for government policy, correct economics leads to correct policy, incorrect economics leads to incorrect policy. Emphasis on the stealth part, economic does not openly admit to being politics because if it did it would render itself redundant; it's purpose is to advocate policies from a standpoint of supposed scientific neutrality because if policies can be argued from a seemingly neutral standpoint then that is more persuasive than coming at people with a whole political package.
"Capital" as a category provides a useful criteria for the site or individual AI to choose whether or not to buy the item. The AI can check if all individual site members have their time appropriately filled with occupations, if not, then it will prioritize buying or producing capital to expand the number of occupations available. The AI can check if it has all its critical areas of production up to some threshold, if not, it buys/produces the appropriate critical capital, if it does it buys non-critical capital. This way, forges, picks and axes would be prioritized over beehives, screw presses, and other non-critical stuff, while still ensuring that production is expanded overall. If all occupations are filled, then all things being equal, the AI will know that it doesn't need to buy any capital.
So yeah, hypothetically you could set up your system to not treat capital as different, but practically speaking, it provides a useful category to the AI to buy/produce it under some conditions and not others. It ties in well with your idea about tracking occupations also.
That was my original idea. I was just pointing out that as per the system of trading, capital is treated just as any other good. As per the mechanics behind the demand, yes capital does exist. The AI ultimately chucks it's capital demands in with it's other demands and then trades accordingly. It also stockpiles capital as it does other goods, so it will normally be able to expand production to a limited amount without needing to adjust it's trading arrangements.
The question here then is whether we should assign professions first and then have them demand capital or whether they should import capital first and then employ the persons in those professions. The problem is that professions use up both consumables and non-consumables as capital; the simplest way would be to have all professions unproductive unless all their capital demands are met but that is not the most realistic.
Realistically we would distinguish between tools and materials, creating a ratio for the latter while requiring the full demand for the former be met or no production at all regardless of materials available.
Goblin, all parts of your post this time were based on snubbing some part of traditional economics, which the opening post says we agree to work with in this thread.
If you think it is all bollocks, feel free to start another alternative economics thread or whatever. It's gumming up discussion.
Who do you think that this traditional economics 'rule' existed in the first place? Who do you think it was directed against if not ME! Creating cliques based upon particular economics theories is not what we should be doing, neither is excluding people from threads; so I do not believe I should be creating my own rival economics thread in response.
I am not here to apply to the game any alternative economic theory that I would apply to real-life. I am trying to come up with the best economic mechanism in terms of both functionality and realism for the game. There are invevitibly a set of economic theories that are core to the models and clash with your economic ideas but these are custom built for the Dwarf Fortress Universe's mechanics and conditions, not taken out of some textbook of other.
One important asset not accounted for in the KLEM model is information. Pure uncertainty (vermin might eat some of the food stocks, a caravan might get waylaid by bandits, etc.) can be handled fairly easily with something called expected value. The basic notion is that if you want X of something, and expect to succeed in getting it Y% of the time, you budget for X/(Y%) attempts. This re-creates most of the stockpiling behavior described above, but in a larger framework that handles far more general circumstances. Another type of uncertainty is not so easily handled.
Asymmetric information (Alice knows something that Bob does not and it would affect Bob's willingness to pay if he knew) is a far, far more complicated problem. Fortunately, a whole class of asymmetric information problems called "adverse selection" are completely absent from Dwarf Fortress. This is because you can look at an item and know its quality level and wear level with complete certainty. And you can look at a creature and know its skills with complete certainty. Huge swathes of real-world law deal with people misrepresenting goods or their own capabilities, and that's just a non-issue here. Other information issues remain (NPCs should be more careful in what news they relay), but those can safely be considered part of generic NPC social interactions.
This is one basic issue with my own system (the other is quality). I can make the AI trade properly with itself, since it can accurately predict what the other settlement's production, demand and quality will be, as they work in a predictable manner. The hard part is how to get it to correctly estimate what the human player does or does not need.
The basic idea was that the AI would look at the population the player has divided by possession, the available resources locally available and then it would calculate what the player 'should' supply and demand. Once the player has been contacted by them however the player can directly communicate with the other settlement, by means of buying and selling goods; plus actually informing them of what they demand. In an elastic fashion the game fits the player into it according to a custom economic model built specifically for the player's own settlement.
The present system artificially bombards the player with all manner of goods hoping that at least a few items will be in demand and accepts an infinite quantity of goods in return based upon an essentially fixed price; this is irrational and unrealistic in the extreme. My system replaces this with a finite number, quality and quantity being demanded by the AI and a far smaller variety of goods being supplied by them. If anything this will help reduce the headache of having to go through hundreds of seperate items individually.
They would demand only a few items, in a fixed quantity, equal to or above a certain quality and all this based upon the projected productivity of the player's settlement. The ratio/price would be based upon how much of the total amount of goods that they demand they are getting against the total percentage of their available stock that is demanded in return.
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Topic: Uristonomics: Dynamic Item Value (Read 15925 times)