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[MDFification]

Seeing as the Tavern Update is approaching, I think it's a good idea to re-examine how ownership works in DF.

I was disappointed by the old economy, because it could have added so much more social complexity to the fort. The fortress ultimately owning everything but the shops (and then still possessing unlimited rights to bulldoze one) and being the employer of everyone in the fort made the economy feel less like a meaningful change to how you'd play and more like an arbitrary infliction of poverty on some of the forts dwarves.

What I'd like to see are as follows;

1. Every room (zones, workshops, farm plots, whatever) has an owner (by default, the fortress). In the future, this will allow us to sell or rent these rooms and their capacity to produce/provide services to the fortress dwarves or some internal entity like a guild. If, in the future, a room is owned by an NPC the player can't just order it deconstructed without buying it back.

2. Relationships between dwarves in some way represented in-game. Just track who is subordinated to who for now - later the economic relationships between these individuals can be defined. But right now, your Chief Medical Dwarf is just a guy who the voice of god has told to diagnose people. There is no in-game relationship between them and whoever appointed them, or their staff.

However the future economy works out, I think these two things are necessary prerequisites. If you want dwarves to be able to be land owners instead of just tenants, to employ one another or to have really any service economy instead of just a material economy, these frameworks will be crucial in enabling this.

[AceSV]

I'm trying to think through how that would work.  Using a farm plot as example, the player mines out an area for it and orders a dwarf to build a farm plot.  Once it's built, the player/government owns it, and can choose what to build on it.  If the player wants to, the farm can be sold to an individual dwarf for money.  I assume the money goes to the player/government and can be used for other things.  Then the dwarf owner can grow whatever s/he wants and owns whatever grows. 

But then why does a dwarf build a farm plot in the first place?  Do you have to pay them to do this or can you just order them to?  Once the plot is privately own, does the dwarf owner have to buy seeds to plant?  Will the owner pay for potash to fertilize?  Who will harvest the crops?  Can the owner pay other dwarves to harvest large crops?  If so, how does the owner decide that hirelings are necessary?  Will factors like Endurance and Stress Vulnerability impact that decision?  Could an owner with great social skills get away with paying a lower wage to hirelings or convince friends and family to help harvest for free?  Once the crops are harvested, who owns them, the owner? the player/government? the hirelings?  If the plant is sold to a brewer, should the brewer own the seeds that come out, and make the farmer buy the seeds back to start the next harvest? 

Then there's the concept of vertical integration.  In dwarf fortress, a vertically integrated textile manufacturer would own the Clothier Shop, the Loom, the Farmer's Workshop and the Farm Plot.  Allegedly, if a single dwarf owned all four shops, that single dwarf probably isn't good at all the skills associated with textile production.  Would the owner try to hire farmers, weavers and clothiers?  Would the owner charge clothiers to use his shop and then let them keep the clothes, or would clothiers pay the owner to use the shop and then keep the clothes themselves?  Would it become like the human world where silver tongued socialites own everything and hard working skilled craftsman are just on payroll? 

[MDFification]

-snip-

I'm only suggesting laying the framework (by distinctly tracking ownership and hierarchies in a way that the player can see) that allows an economy with much more frequent dwarf-to-dwarf wealth transfer than the previous system to be developed in the future. Those are all very valid points to raise regarding how such an economy would ultimately function, and I'd love to discuss them more in depth after I get home from work.

[NW_Kohaku]

The first of those is in a few ways similar to the Class Warfare suggestion, although part of what I was suggesting there was that it take place over time, rather than being a base feature. 

Toady has said in the past that he wants the first few years to be more like a captain at sea, where everyone just does what they're told because it's for survival.  When you get more accomplished, that's supposed to change.

Spoiler: I sure get a lot of mileage out of this quote (click to show/hide)

Would you even consider changing the relationship that the player has with the dwarves right now (as unquestioned overlord and direct allower and denier of all things dwarves can and cannot do), so that dwarves can become more autonomous and individual, and possibly create a better simulation, while on the other hand, potentially dramatically upping the potential for Fun because dwarves are stupid and very likely to hurt themselves unless continually babysat, or perhaps more importantly, if it meant that the player had less direct control over his fortress, and had to rely more on coaxing the ants in his/her antfarm to do his/her bidding?

Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.  I don't think coaxing is the way I'm thinking of it though, as with a game like Majesty which somebody brought up, because your orders would also carry the weight of being assumed to be for survival for the most part, not as bounties or a similar system.  Once your fortress is larger, you might have to work a little harder to keep people around, but your dwarves in the first year would be more like crew taking orders from the captain of a ship out to sea or something, where you'd have difficulty getting them to do what you want only if you've totally flopped and they are ready to defy the expedition leader.

The overall idea in Class Warfare is that it starts out a Communist Command Economy, and gradually turns into something more capitalist over time as the dwarves' unity against a hostile environment decays into interpersonal squabbling as your fortress grows more established.  (This, in turn, is a way to counteract the game's current hard-at-first-but-easy-when-established "learning cliff", where, once survival is achieved, there's basically nothing left to do but wait for the next FB or siege or go start a megaproject to kill time.)

Hence, I like the idea of ownership, but think it should be more of a gradual thing.  Your fortress has no money and communal ownership at first, but slowly turns to privatization and mercantilism. 


Also, keep in mind that the Chief Medical Dwarf is appointed by the Mayor or Expedition Leader, not God.  (And the player is supposed to be those appointed or elected nobles, for the most part.) 

That said, forcing more relationships between CMD and practicing doctors does make more good sense. Right now, the CMD just knows the health of all dwarves. Requiring the CMD to check up on doctors after some period of time to get status updates the same way that bookkeepers need to go back to the desk to renew their magic memorization of the location of every item in the map would work for that, and having dwarves have some forced check-ins with superiors also would make some great sense.

[GoblinCookie]

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1. Every room (zones, workshops, farm plots, whatever) has an owner (by default, the fortress). In the future, this will allow us to sell or rent these rooms and their capacity to produce/provide services to the fortress dwarves or some internal entity like a guild. If, in the future, a room is owned by an NPC the player can't just order it deconstructed without buying it back.

But why would we even allow any rooms to be owned by private entities?  Especially if we cannot deconstruct them without paying a price. 

2. Relationships between dwarves in some way represented in-game. Just track who is subordinated to who for now - later the economic relationships between these individuals can be defined. But right now, your Chief Medical Dwarf is just a guy who the voice of god has told to diagnose people. There is no in-game relationship between them and whoever appointed them, or their staff.

However the future economy works out, I think these two things are necessary prerequisites. If you want dwarves to be able to be land owners instead of just tenants, to employ one another or to have really any service economy instead of just a material economy, these frameworks will be crucial in enabling this.

Well no, the Chief Medical Dwarf is appointed by either the mayor or the expedition leader; not the voice of god.  If you want subordinates, all you have to do is create a number of new entity positions appointed by the Chief Medical Dwarf.

Allowing private ownership of stuff is in no way necessary for the service economy to work at all.  Dwarves can do stuff for each-other without anyone having to own rooms and the fortress can pay them to do it or they just take stuff they need like at the moment.