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[Waparius]

Currently, fort mode is too locked into what TVTropes calls the "Command and Conquer economy" - that is, players are responsible for ordering everything to be built, whether it's a bridge or a stew. Obviously this gets in the way of a realistic cooking system, but other people have talked through the cooking situation. A big part of that is having food cooked-to-order - that is, instead of having barrels and barrels of stacked +Plump Helmet Stew+ (however that's supposed to work), dwarven cooks will prepare food on-demand.

I suggest that this be extended to as much fortress industry as possible. Craftsdwarves, clothesmakers, jewellers, farmers, and other non-military, non-construction workers ought to spend most of their time in a prosperous fort labouring for themselves and each other rather than for the Crown.

To make this work, dwarves could follow a sort of heirarchy of needs in their decision-making - something like, safety -> security -> prosperity. A starving dwarf will work for plump helmets and a place in the dormitory, but as they get more comfortable they start buying nicer meals, renting a bedroom and stocking up on biscuits and preserved food in case of hard times. Eventually they should start buying (and wearing!) jewelery and expensive clothes, and getting their furniture decorated.

The thing is, though, these decisions are made by the dwarves themselves, paid for with their own money. This money would start with dwarves employed by the Crown - miners, soldiers, loggers, furnace operators, builders - most of the basic resource-extraction jobs. Additionally dwarves would be able to buy and sell of their own accord from the marketplace/trade depot. It may be possible for gifted traders to make a living buying and selling goods, as well. If work becomes scarce, a dwarf will slowly (unhappily) slide back down the ladder, selling their possessions to put food on the table - unless they become upset enough to just buy provisions and leave on the next caravan.

 Alternately, a dwarf may take up a pick or otherwise try to get government work. Dwarves ought to be more autonomous in their choice of labours - though players should still be able to force a dwarf into a given line of work to make up for shortfalls. Dwarves could like and dislike particular work, meaning in the former they'd seek out that job if it's available, and in the latter get an unhappy thought if forced into that work.

In terms of getting things done at the player's beck and call, I'd take a leaf out of feudalism's book - if dwarves don't have the money to pay their rent, they perform labour for the Crown, whether through working the fields or just making trinkets for the nobility. This would also cover any player ordered crafts, such as uniforms for the militia. To simplify things, the player should be able to designate fields, workshops and stockpiles for private use.

Farming ought to be nerfed and mostly farmed out to hilldwarves - these along with caravans would provide an additional source of dwarven income and ease the burden on the player.

[Vattic]

We had similar to this back when the economy was still active. Dwarves would earn money doing jobs and spend them in shops manned by other dwarves. They'd have to rent their rooms meaning you had to build varying quality levels including slums for the poor. You also had guilds making demands. It had many issues and was turned off until a new system is finished.

[Naryar]

...Already planned ?

[Andeerz]

Waparius, your suggestion is good, and I agree with you in general about what needs to be done. 

However, may I point you to some previous suggestions that you might find interesting?  We could definitely use some more minds thinking about this stuff... and I am currently working on studying a few of these suggestions (in particular, counting's suggestions) and developing them further, as well as integrating them all together.

Here are the suggestion threads:

• http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=85289.msg2296845#msg2296845  <- this one and the next are absolutely brilliant... Hell, all of counting's suggestions are.  They just need some more concrete details about exactly how to plug in these things into the game and where and at what level of detail...
• http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=88258.msg2413199#msg2413199
  
• http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=74616.msg1875315#msg1875315
  
• http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=69644.msg1721432#msg1721432

I linked to several things I have posted... but there are a lot of cool things in these threads posted by other people. 

ALSO:

...Already planned ?

Already planned... but I am not sure if there is any information about what will be part of this system and how it will be implemented.  This needs to be discussed by the community.  I am sure that Toady would really appreciate some ideas!  It is a very tough beast to slay. 

Oh, and on a final note, allow me to re-emphasize that counting's suggestions are awesome.  They allow for a non-arbitrary assignment of value (though it needs some more refinement... I think it is too abstract at the moment, though I have a LOT more to learn in order to understand it all... so this opinion might change), AND the emergence of currency without anything needing to be hard coded.  It is BRILLIANT.

[Waparius]

Ah, thanks for the links. I did try to search for previous suggestions along these lines, but nothing turned up for me. And yeah, I remember the economy from both the 2d and 40d days. The main suggestion I was making was to mostly automate industries not directly related to construction, mining and the militia. I'll check the links now.

[StagnantSoul]

I like the idea. +1 support.

[vjmdhzgr]

It sounds like your idea is to change it from the play telling dwarves what to do to dwarves doing whatever they want which to me sounds like a terrible idea and I strongly oppose it.

[Adrian]

Giving dwarves a little autonomy isn't necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, the only way for an in-game economy to work is to let dwarves decide for themselves when and what to buy.
It'll give the player high-level control of the economy by making sure all dwarves have enough work to do (and thus get paid) to make a basic living, without swamping the player in the micromanagement of checking up on each and every dwarf and telling them they need to go buy new socks.

That doesn't mean that the game will turn into a "sit back and watch your dwarves build an awesome fort"-kinda thing, though.
But once fortresses grow to 100+ dwarves, high-level control over the economy through job-, and resource management will be preferential over micromanaging individuals.

[Urist Arrhenius]

It sounds like your idea is to change it from the play telling dwarves what to do to dwarves doing whatever they want which to me sounds like a terrible idea and I strongly oppose it.

I think a good simulation game, and DF is more simulation than strategy, will involve some autonomy of the subjects. I don't want to control every action of my dwarves because the coolest thing about DF is that they are independent personalities. More autonomy would reinforce this in the gameplay.

[utunnels]

It sounds like your idea is to change it from the play telling dwarves what to do to dwarves doing whatever they want which to me sounds like a terrible idea and I strongly oppose it.

I think a good simulation game, and DF is more simulation than strategy, will involve some autonomy of the subjects. I don't want to control every action of my dwarves because the coolest thing about DF is that they are independent personalities. More autonomy would reinforce this in the gameplay.

In another word, not being able to control every thing is part of the fun.
Just to what extent.

[Ops Fox]

I enjoy setting up my metal and food industry, I would not like to see my dwarfs take control of that and leave it up to whim. I could see dwarfs earning a wage from public work they are assigned, then spending that on caravan goods or purchasing state goods. Then we have the issue of dwarves leaving coins everywhere. Could have a banker noble added that stores all the coinage in a vault and dwarfs purchase interfort goods like rent and socks on credit but they go to the bank to grab physical coins to make a purchase from a caravan. That should keep the dwarfs from dividing the money up into a 100 piles of coins since the only time the idiots dwarfs deal with actual coins is when they are taken off the map.

That is similar to how the old economy worked though isn't?

What I wish we could do is create sets of jobs like say farmer and kitchen worker with associated jobs linked to buildings, separate from a dwarfs skills. Dwarfs assigned the farmer position for instance will preform food hauling in burrow FARMLAND, plant crops in fields 1 - 3, and work in stock piles "food" 1 - 2. Then when immigrants show up rather then selecting their active skills and assigning them to burrows you can just say your going to be a farmer, then they automatically know which skill set they should use and where they should work, but are not confined to live solely in that burrow.

[Vattic]

Ops Fox: If you ever let your dwarves get their hands on coins they'd divide them up, shuffle them around, and it'd generally clog things up. Instead people would just never mint coins and it'd all be handled as if they were using debit cards.

[Ops Fox]

Ops Fox: If you ever let your dwarves get their hands on coins they'd divide them up, shuffle them around, and it'd generally clog things up. Instead people would just never mint coins and it'd all be handled as if they were using debit cards.

I saw that on the wiki that's why I suggested the dwarfs only use credit for inter fortress goods like rent and food. The only time a dwarf should use coins is when they need to purchase something from the caravan, in which case the caravans will take the loose change off the map with them.

[Icefire2314]

While this is interesting and a good idea, I think it should be toggleable in the Noble screen, and only once you have a certain level. It reduces a lot of micromanagement later, but in the beginning it would literally eliminate almost everything to be done apart from designating tiles.

[GoblinCookie]

Giving dwarves a little autonomy isn't necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, the only way for an in-game economy to work is to let dwarves decide for themselves when and what to buy.
It'll give the player high-level control of the economy by making sure all dwarves have enough work to do (and thus get paid) to make a basic living, without swamping the player in the micromanagement of checking up on each and every dwarf and telling them they need to go buy new socks.

That doesn't mean that the game will turn into a "sit back and watch your dwarves build an awesome fort"-kinda thing, though.
But once fortresses grow to 100+ dwarves, high-level control over the economy through job-, and resource management will be preferential over micromanaging individuals.

This is where the whole thing breaks down.  If we just have dwarves buying goods that we make by manager decree as at present then the whole thing is pointless and simply adds a whole dimension of complexity since we have to either set or figure out how to break the pricing system so everything costs so little that every dwarf can buy anything he or she wants, so things basically work as they do at the moment.

Having dwarves independantly make their own goods seems a tempting solution at first glance except that the resources they are using for manufacture are finite and presumably designated by us.  A clash immediately appears between essential needs for the player's fortress plan and the essentially chaotic production going on about the place.  The situation is akin to having a semi-automatic manager arbiterily assigning the production of a whole lot of random junk on top of all the stuff you actually want to make, whether for export to the caraven, or for building up your fortress etc.

Money some people might suggest would fix things but actually it simply makes the economy harder to manage.  Instead of merely having to do some arithmatic to add up all the demands of all your dwarves, which remain consistant over time you now have to ruffle through everyone's bank accounts to determine how much money the 'average' dwarf has and then how much of everything you can feasibly produce, before getting to the buisiness of fixing all prices low enough that everybody can afford them but not so low that gets so much of it that there is a shortage.  Of course if we do not fix the prices ourselves then we will have some mechanism do so for us, which means that we will end up having to do stupid inefficiant things in order to manipulate prices, generally down.

The way the economy should be developed is to keep the basic system for the time being but add a dynamic system of demand so that dwarves start off as at present but they pick up new demands as time goes on, based upon percieved available resources.  If dwarves cannot find a non-forbidden, accessable item then they will go to the office of one of the nobles of your fort, so manager, bookkeeper, mayor, baron/duke/count or king and place a request for the item.  All the demands that have been reported at the office can then be met by the player simply by buying them from the caravan or logging them into the manager, the latter should ideally be accomplished simply by pressing a button on the screen next to the demand in question.