> Goods already are produced by local sites in worldgen based off adjacency to resources, so peddlers made out of normal folk would just take the production stock & some money (personal finance management would need tracking, people carry money in adventure but not dwarf mode) so with whatever you can haul on your pack animal or acceptable wagon/backpack and be sold. And the amount of money & pack weight a merchant has determines what they can carry. Would be simple enough with prior explained setup.
The local sites can produce stuff using the total available resources because the sites 'exist', in that has a population number which has certain skills and reactions available to it. They are also located within a given set of biomes, which is also 'exist' in that the flora, minerals and so on are also tracked. The individual people in a site however do not exist, which means they cannot engage in internal economic activity directly to each-other except when the game is onloaded, which creates a problem in that it all has to be uploaded INTO the basic numbers. These numbers in order for the player not to disrupt the economic engine have to normally (without player intervention) be roughly consistent with what would be the case had the player not turned up at all, especially in adventure mode.
In my idea the merchant own numbers do not decide what goods he has. The merchant is created as a final result of the site the merchant comes from deciding what goods your site should want and what goods it has to spare. What pack animals/wagons/extra help the merchant has depends not on anything the merchant has but simply the volume of the goods the site thinks you will be needing and it has to spare. So there is no mechanical difference between a lone peddler and a full caravan with 100 wagons, it is simply based upon the amount of goods that the site decides they are happy to sell you and which you should buy (according to their logics), against the goods that they want to get from you and they 'think' you should be willing to hand over.
When the merchants return to their home site they are simply uploaded into the site, the transaction between you and them is now simply treated as being a transaction between your site and their site. Only if they do not return to their home base is the transaction economically logged as being between the sites and the merchant, this is so an orphaned merchant whose home is destroyed can migrate to another site and take the goods along with him, also so that bandits who waylay caravans can transfer the goods to their own site.
> Dwarf fortress has many different ways you could earn money beside selling all your pouch of food to buy a admantium battleaxe as you say, the desperate might simply steal, take up quests or jobs in such a scenario that lets say non-player fortresses pay their workers via the more closely connected state that holds the most equity that's being minted and guilds/organisations within politically. A national army would be different to a local militia in what is subsidized for covering costs of feeding your soldiers gruel and nessecary weapon replacements and giving them a wage to ensure a certain degree of loyalty (obviously goblins have none so bribe at your own risk)
- Commercialised towns (they already charge you in taverns), self sufficient hamlets and player fortresses would be basically somewhere inbetween the two, a concious choice to choose between free food & commodities for everyone vs commercialising things because of good central production lines & imports from surrounding hillocks you've supported in your local area (further down the line with the hill dwarf arc etc etc.) would be a interesting take on how you want to play and how your fortress fits into the world.
The 'prices' of things appear only when the sites are onloaded for the player, the economy itself does not work on the prices on things at all; the prices are basically a means of slotting the player into the economic system. Instead of the objects having a value, the site demands a certain set of goods, it guesses that you should have a certain set of goods and it calculates the optimal trade between the party and all the other parties it is in commercial contact with.
To the player this appears as "I will give you 10 of this for 1 of those", what the site is actually doing is dividing up the surplus goods it has among all the possible trading partners that should be interested in those goods in order to get the largest possible % of all the goods that it demands.
Your assumption on trading bread for beads is based on dwarves exchanging the monetary value of bread, if such monetary value of bread was removed from commerical use unless its being sold or bartered to stop such a action occuring then it would effectively solve it. (you can't offer a bread loaf as payment in a commercialised society when they demand coins unless you first purposefully sell bread for coins, in which case you should probably learn how to be a baker fast by buying bargain price wheat from the farmer or save up your money from buying cheaper kinds of bread for a few silver spare and a bitter gritty taste)
Its not real communism because of the central authoritarian dwarven state that will own all the produced equity of the minted coins and therefore always hold a uneven balance. Like existing communist countries, usually the workforce is used to drive the state and maintain its funding & focus (*spending only at state discretion like deliberate attempts at artitecture in the soviet union rather than place it in the hands of a independent architect firm business who might have a better grasp of how to get the job done and can be blame for the shortfall*) in usually a exploitative manner of the lower class of society (criminals particularly) for labour camps.
- Most socialism derives from common exploitative labour of the lower classes, as much opposed to the working people in government, hence its much easier to have lots of immigrants making large profit margins to maintain the state which then provides free welfare to a lower-middle class upwards. State collapses economically and the worker class bourgeois suffer with no welfare, dwarves starve because they are FORCED to buy food because nobody is cultivating it anymore, a bit like a were-beast wiping out your human & animalmen skilled planters and replacing them with fat, non kinesthetic, un-agile replacements when its cleaned up and labour reassigned.
Yes the idea is that the goods that the site is selling are surplus goods and not goods that are in demand. The problem with the above however is that all demands are not equal and not all items equally meet the same demand. Starving sites ought to choose to sell their furniture in order to buy food, even when the food is worth less (in present terms) and should not choose to buy the most valuable food item with their valuable furniture as opposed to buying a sufficient quantity of lower quality.
Some demands should rank higher than others and this should decide what is put up for sale in the first place. Money should not be a separate thing but simply the item types whose demand is the absolute last in the list and which loops forever. That is when the site has met all it's needs to the best of it's ability it starts to log in demands for money into the system. Once the demand for money is met it simply logs in another demand for money and so it goes on forever.
Remembering that all items that meet a demand are not equal this results in a situation where, in order to get to get the surplus items that the money hoarding site produces other sites produce things that are of higher quality than the goods that are already meeting the demands of that site: for instance.
A very established and established fortress has now got items that meet all it's demands, causing it to demand money. It's soldiers however are only equipped with copper battle axes, but another site produces adamantium battle axes. That site will sell the adamantium battle axes to the fortress because the money demand always logs lower than the battle axe demand, their demand to upgrade their weapons hence outranks their demand for money and so they part with money. The site wants money either because it too is full maxed out demand wise or because there is a third site that has something it wants and demands money.
Those independent artisans (architect firm example) with some insight reflect on how dwarven guilds might operate (ask a stonecutter from a stonemason guild to price a job, they might come out with some amendments to your plans etc. in example not foreseeable game terms), so really the dwarf system is not communist at all, it is a 'communal' player fortresses but its based on capitalist customs of specialists working for themselves (until such they set that aside to benefit the fortress which in turn should benefit themselves independently) and the rest of the kingdom working off a system of bartering marketplaces & coinage legal tender as seen in worldgen shops and individually training up professions and livelyhoods.
Ostrich doesn't claim to be communism/political leaning expert but that's my analysis of your arguments.
I have already discussed with Hinaichigo how the game economy CANNOT function based upon specialists working for themselves, due to the nonexistence of everybody when we are not there. The only place where it could feasibly work is fortress mode, but fortress mode has to fit into the wider world due to retiring fortresses and once the economy is developed into the wider world economy during play.
I do not know why you keep denying the obvious, that dwarf fortress is present Communist in *both* modes. Everyone automatically gets given their items by the group they are part of upon download, everything that they need according to the resources the group has. This rule applies as much in human towns, the folks there get given items according to what they need and what the site can give them. Exactly the same system applies in fortress mode, the only difference being that there is a definite finite quantity of items there, but assuming the player plays competently the result is the same as adventure mode. It all works fine, but you just do not like the way things work so you and others design a 'counter-revolution' to make things work in the Capitalist manner that you are ideologically comfortable with (there is no other real motive).
Now in my model for the economy, the adventurers (and other groups that are not site governments) are economically treated as though they were simply a type of mobile site. That means the player starts off as far the economy as concerned as a 1 person site, with their own skills and the environment surrounding them being used to initially slot them into the wider economy, hence deciding what they can buy and what the other sites will be willing to sell them as above. As with fortress mode if the player ends up behaving differently to the projected model (as is almost inevitable), then the players own economic data is adjusted accordingly.
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Topic: Marketplaces in Fortress Mode (Read 2223 times)