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[daggaz]

There are two major issues with the evolution of gameplay over time, and both are relatively easy to fix.  It is also advantageous to at least attempt a correction earlier in development, rather than later.

The first issue is overproduction; the game is swimming in items.  You can plonk down with a unskilled dwarf and start churning out stone items (mechanisms, crafts, tables, whatever).  A carpenter will soon flood a fort with beds.  Farming is broken, just a 2x2 plot can eventually feed an entire fort with ease, and this is magnified by the broken brewery setup.  These two are especially critical as food + drink are one of the fundamental limiting factors in the game design, and as of right now, they don't limit anything (don't even get me started on turkeys).   The end result is your dwarves are drowning in FPS killing items, overview of the fort becomes almost impossible especially for newer players, and challenge is reduced.  Related to this are the migrant waves.  Dwarves are also a resource, and players get absolutely flooded with them by the second year, destroying FPS and especially obliterating any sense of oversight and control.  It's not FUN for the majority of players.  The only challenge is maintaining the work flow. 

The second issue, which compounds all of this, is the economic aspect.  You can take those rock mechanisms or mugs, and with an untrained broker, easily purchase everything you could possibly want (and don't realistically need) already from the first caravan.  By the second year, you can routinely purchase the entire caravan if you know what you are doing.  Challenge goes down the toilet along with overview. 

It would benefit the game greatly, if all of this got turned down a few notches.  Untrained dwarves should be bad at producing any kind of items, making skill selection at embark a valuable and difficult decision again.  It should take more time to train up a number of skills (carpentry for example is ridiculously easy), and the amount of items produced should be affected accordingly.  The quality should matter more, prices should reflect this better, but most importantly again, you should be challenged to produce that many items, and as well with a limit on supply, be given the difficult decision : do you sell them or use them.  Having a poor broker should also matter, and pinching the supply makes it easier to magnify his importance.  Now you would be helped somewhat by having fewer dwarves, but ultimately it should be a race of sorts, full of interesting decisions.  Who spends their valuable time doing what, can you beat the food booze clock, can you build your defenses before the !fun! begins (traps are OP as well), etc..

At least for the early and middle game, some simple tweaks would go a long ways to improving the challenge levels and reintroducing interesting decisions.  If the late game remains broken... well you won the game I suppose, it's a sandbox after all it should be possible.  Ultimately for the end-game, fine tuning a more advanced economic system (do the human neighbors really want a tenth shipment of 18 metric dwarf-tons of stone figurines?) and careful tweaking of game-balance would be the goal, but again, the idea here is to suggest some quick and easy patches to increase the fun. 

Just my 2 cents. 

[ZM5]

Emotions are gonna be rebalanced in this bugfix cycle, so thats gonna be one of the balancing issues fixed - current emotions being too strong leads to no internal threats the fort has to face beyond the occasional vampire.

A lot of the current economy-related issues (like being able to drown caravans in crafts that aren't actually useful goods) will probably be addressed in the economy update. Thats probably years from now though, I admit - but it will be interesting to see merchants not taking crafts or any useless junk because the mountainhome is facing a war and requires food, armor or weapons, not trinkets.

I do agree though that "negative" skill modifiers should be a thing. I.e a particularly badly-skilled and/or creatively-deficient dwarf making poor-quality crafts, that merchants will either take for lower prices - or alternatively, if the object is of excessively poor quality they'll feel insulted you're even offering it to them. For other skills it could lead to other consequences, like a dwarf burning themselves because they're poor at wood burning or smelting (not neccessarily 100% fatal like current burning), or malpractise/misdiagnoses in cases of poor doctor skills resulting in the patient's state worsening.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Definitely agree production should be slowed down somewhat, don't remember if it's been talked about but hopefully it's something that'll be looked at along with the economy (since they'll very much be linked).

Negative quality levels was mentioned as planned in the December FotF:

(Part 2 of 2)
...

...
ii) Is it planned to add a FAIL-option in crafting? For example a dabbling stoneworker works on a rock mug with the effect of destroying his stone for no result?
...

...
ii) The idea was to add five negative quality levels.  I'm not sure if that'll also include complete failure, though it probably should for some jobs.
...

As for the rest, yeah, the economy update should from the sound of it mean an almost complete rework of everything trade and value related. And with how Toady usually works there's unlikely to be any placeholdery tweaks of related things before then. Sure it's a few years down the line, but still relatively close. Only need to go through myth/magic and starting scenarios along with whatever other things will tag along there, then probably boats and after that the economy, from what I last gathered the plan to be ^^

[mirrizin]

I've also noticed that, while it is very convenient for getting rid of crap and freeing up stockpile space, bulk-selling the crappy armor and shredded clothes of goblins seems a bit of an exploit.

[King Mir]

I agree with all this completely, but would add one more suggestion to top them all:

For all these balance fixes, make the sensitivity raw configurable.

That way, players have the ability to rebalanced the game themselves to their liking, and allows better feedback for what optimal values would be.

[Timmi]

I agree with all this completely, but would add one more suggestion to top them all:

For all these balance fixes, make the sensitivity raw configurable.

That way, players have the ability to rebalanced the game themselves to their liking, and allows better feedback for what optimal values would be.

Definitely this sounds great

[GoblinCookie]

Definitely agree production should be slowed down somewhat, don't remember if it's been talked about but hopefully it's something that'll be looked at along with the economy (since they'll very much be linked).

Negative quality levels was mentioned as planned in the December FotF:

Production is if anything lower than is realistic (in fortress mode).  It is the lower level consumption that is unrealistic (including how items don't break).

[daggaz]

Sinks are certainly conspicuously absent in this game (tho a counter argument revolving around increased tedium can also be made ...its a game-design balance issue), but don't base an argument on "realism" for a game that simulates dwarves living under a mountain boozing themselves to death while the elves pester them about how many trees they may or may not have had unethical relations with during their last festival celibrating the defeat of the goblin empire of Stinking Fortress of Cheeses. 

No matter how much realism is put into this simulation, it's still both A) a fantasy setting and more importantly B) an abstraction. 

The question is instead, how much production is both manageable and still challenging to the player, vs how much fun this is overall.  In that light, current production levels are scarecely maneagable once they get going (they even necessitated the need for an in-game "manager", whats next, dwarven excell professional?) and this, I have argued, lowers both challenge and fun.  Sinks are a fundamental means of countering gross resource accumulation, but they dont directly address the rate which is the fundamental problem here.  Case in point, if you drastically increased clothes destruction to make an extreme example, would that be fun?  Now you are overproducing rope-reed socks just to keep 180 dwarves from being unhappy every week when their socks get holes in them and get thrown out.  That hasn't solved the problem, it has actually doubled the work-load regarding resource management.

Now we are getting into tricky balance issues which should be addressed.. but it's much further down the road.  Should weapons break in battle? Probably.  How often?  How long does the average fort last and what setting would cause a fun level of competition between the player fort and invading civilizations, regarding their metal resources?  How does trading factor into that.  What about all these other items, etc. etc..  It's a difficult situation, and as I argued in the OP, it is simpler and more beneficial to just turn down the production rates at the base first, and then get into balance issues as the game progresses. 

   

[GoblinCookie]

Sinks are certainly conspicuously absent in this game (tho a counter argument revolving around increased tedium can also be made ...its a game-design balance issue), but don't base an argument on "realism" for a game that simulates dwarves living under a mountain boozing themselves to death while the elves pester them about how many trees they may or may not have had unethical relations with during their last festival celibrating the defeat of the goblin empire of Stinking Fortress of Cheeses. 

No matter how much realism is put into this simulation, it's still both A) a fantasy setting and more importantly B) an abstraction. 

The question is instead, how much production is both manageable and still challenging to the player, vs how much fun this is overall.  In that light, current production levels are scarecely maneagable once they get going (they even necessitated the need for an in-game "manager", whats next, dwarven excell professional?) and this, I have argued, lowers both challenge and fun.  Sinks are a fundamental means of countering gross resource accumulation, but they dont directly address the rate which is the fundamental problem here.  Case in point, if you drastically increased clothes destruction to make an extreme example, would that be fun?  Now you are overproducing rope-reed socks just to keep 180 dwarves from being unhappy every week when their socks get holes in them and get thrown out.  That hasn't solved the problem, it has actually doubled the work-load regarding resource management.

Now we are getting into tricky balance issues which should be addressed.. but it's much further down the road.  Should weapons break in battle? Probably.  How often?  How long does the average fort last and what setting would cause a fun level of competition between the player fort and invading civilizations, regarding their metal resources?  How does trading factor into that.  What about all these other items, etc. etc..  It's a difficult situation, and as I argued in the OP, it is simpler and more beneficial to just turn down the production rates at the base first, and then get into balance issues as the game progresses. 
 

It does not really change the manager workload involved in playing the game whether we order 180 socks be made or 18.  There are two ways we can 'solve' the excessive surplus problem, the first of these is to turn down production rates to unrealistically low for a given period of time and number of workers employed.  The second is to increase the amount consumed, while both will work the latter approach develops the game, both in terms of the mechanics involved and the content, it is 'sinks' as you put add things into the game.

Reducing production on the other hand basically entails the devs going through a whole load of old code to make things take longer to do or cost more to make.  There is another element, we need a surplus in the game in order to fuel the economy later on, since surplus value is what an economy is based on.  If the total amount of value produced by your dwarves does not exceed the amount of value they consume then there is no larger economy possible beyond your fortress and the idea is to add such an economy into the game.

[daggaz]

Seriously, this is a game where a dwarf can turn a boulder in about one real-life minute into a "mechanism" which can be transformed into a lever, which can be linked to a bridge (also made of boulders) using two more mechanisms regardless of distance between the bridge and the lever.  What do you mean by "realistic" levels of production.  There is no such thing, please use terms that reflect the subject matter. 

As to 180 vs 18 socks, yes it does make a big difference, because even assuming the player is using a manager (you cant assume that, especially with new players who are going to be the hardest hit by the problems I am describing), you need more farmplots to generate more raw items to be processed in more workshops to be staffed by more dwarves to deal with that much more socks in the same amount of time.  Having too many dwarves was also mentioned in the OP as resource overabundance. 

The argument about dev time to deal with old code is pointless, ANY change will require dev time and will likely require dealing backwards with old code to resolve bugs, both emergent and human error.  As I argue in the OP, doing this now is simpler than adding on lots of new code and then having to go back and retune a larger code base with more degrees of interaction between functions.

The last point, about needing a surplus to drive the economy, is exactly my point in the OP about needing challenge in the game.  It should be a challenge to build up your economy, and part of that challenge would involve the player making important decisions that affect the outcome of their game.  Eventually (and here the timeframe can be tweaked to optimize the fun-challenge axis) a surplus economy most definitely should be possible, by any number of paths, but it shouldn't drop into the player's lap as it does now.  You can buy out the caravan with ease before you even have a functional military as it stands. What is important is that the player gets interesting decisions.  Under my proposal, you would still produce items, but in the early game they would be limited.  You can still trade them, but are they a surplus, or are they something you need elsewhere?  This then presents the player with an interesting decision that will impact their fort: is there an item the caravan has that the player needs more than the items they currently produced?  What value is that item to the player? As it currently stands, everything is a surplus and thus there is no real decision involved: of course you trade all your crap for basically free stuff from the caravan.   

[GoblinCookie]

Seriously, this is a game where a dwarf can turn a boulder in about one real-life minute into a "mechanism" which can be transformed into a lever, which can be linked to a bridge (also made of boulders) using two more mechanisms regardless of distance between the bridge and the lever.  What do you mean by "realistic" levels of production.  There is no such thing, please use terms that reflect the subject matter. 

As to 180 vs 18 socks, yes it does make a big difference, because even assuming the player is using a manager (you cant assume that, especially with new players who are going to be the hardest hit by the problems I am describing), you need more farmplots to generate more raw items to be processed in more workshops to be staffed by more dwarves to deal with that much more socks in the same amount of time.  Having too many dwarves was also mentioned in the OP as resource overabundance. 

The argument about dev time to deal with old code is pointless, ANY change will require dev time and will likely require dealing backwards with old code to resolve bugs, both emergent and human error.  As I argue in the OP, doing this now is simpler than adding on lots of new code and then having to go back and retune a larger code base with more degrees of interaction between functions.

The last point, about needing a surplus to drive the economy, is exactly my point in the OP about needing challenge in the game.  It should be a challenge to build up your economy, and part of that challenge would involve the player making important decisions that affect the outcome of their game.  Eventually (and here the timeframe can be tweaked to optimize the fun-challenge axis) a surplus economy most definitely should be possible, by any number of paths, but it shouldn't drop into the player's lap as it does now.  You can buy out the caravan with ease before you even have a functional military as it stands. What is important is that the player gets interesting decisions.  Under my proposal, you would still produce items, but in the early game they would be limited.  You can still trade them, but are they a surplus, or are they something you need elsewhere?  This then presents the player with an interesting decision that will impact their fort: is there an item the caravan has that the player needs more than the items they currently produced?  What value is that item to the player? As it currently stands, everything is a surplus and thus there is no real decision involved: of course you trade all your crap for basically free stuff from the caravan.

By realistic levels of production I mean that if I have 100 people and set them to produce stone crafts all year I would end up with 1000s of stone crafts.  That is produce every craftsman realistically finishes a craft at least every few days and they have all year.  Having to have more farm plots is entirely what should happen, because what how we want it to be is that we do not have the manpower to simply set the whole population to producing a giant mountain of crafts.  More realistic eating requirements, means more farm plots means more labour is engaged in farming, which is entirely realistic given that this is what most people at that level of technological development would be doing.  Since we do not have the labour power to put our whole population to producing manufactured goods, we do not end up with an infinite mountain of manufactured goods 'caravan-dumped'. 

You should be able to buy out the caravan, the caravan is there to be bought out.  The caravan folks are not shipping folks across the trackless wilderness in order to not have you buy what they are shipping to your fortress, the optimal situation is for them is that you buy everything up.  The only unrealistic element about the caravan situation is that they are willing to accept a small mountain of stone crafts when the folks over at wherever they are selling will also have a small mountain of stone crafts already.  What we ideally want is a situation where if you want to produce a surplus of manufacturing items, you will not be able to marshal enough labour to maintain enough farm plots to feed your people.  That means that a site specialising in farming can sell you their food and you can sell them your manufactured goods in return.

Hopefully the economic situation will help 'guide' the player towards making the right decisions as to what to get their dwarves to do.  If you have a world where there is already a glut of stone crafts, the caravan would not accept stone crafts but it would accept food, meaning the player would end up growing a surplus food rather than crafting a surplus of crafts.

The thing about the population thing is that the truth is that we need the greatest amount of surplus value to begin with.  That is because surplus value has invested into capital and buildings to begin with, if you have no surplus value you cannot invest any of into capital in order to produce surplus value.  So yes the situation must be that surplus value 'falls into your lap', which is to say you have to able to make a surplus right from the start.  Otherwise we will get stuck in a situation where we have no surplus value to invest in capital but we cannot get any surplus value until we have capital.

[daggaz]

Your premise is faulty and certainly not "the truth".  Furthermore, you never lay out WHY you need to have these things.  You just claim it..  I mean, "the caravan is there so you can buy it out" doesn't adress what happens to game play when you can buy it out for nothing.  When you do address surplus crafts vs food, you actually are agreeing with one of my primary arguments in the OP and contradicting yourself: things are not in true surplus if you have to make major sacrifices to achieve that level of production.  Food in particular, however, is a joke to use in your example because as production stands now, it is impossible to ever starve in this game unless you make multiple critical errors. 

Now you want "realistic" production of 1 dwarf giving 10s of stonecrafts per year.  Lets take the average and say 50.  One dwarf.  Well, thats not going to put a dent in your ability to produce food, ever.  And is more than enough to buy things comfortably from a caravan.  Two dwarves is 100 items..  how long does it take before you can put two dwarves to one task in this game.  You can do this from embark in fact, but more realistically you can do this already from the very first migration.  Well now you have free surplus, which means you reduce challenge with no risk or cost, which means its a no-brainer decision.  No-brainer decisions are anethma to game-design fundamentals.  They remove fun, they remove challenge, and they make the player feel, correctly, that their decisions arent really that important, removing their immersion in the game play.  Being able to buy the entire caravan this way just compounds this issue.  It's not optimal at all, from a game-design standpoint.  It's horrible.

On a "realistic" level, taking into account that the simulation does attempt to model certain aspects of reality with one degree of accuracy or another, why should your caravan trade for any of your easily produced stone crafts?  If you can do it that, easily, so can they.  Or if they cant, well all their dwarven neighbors can, so the price in a realistic economic model would tank.  Easily produced items are worth nothing unless there is a real trade imbalance.  Maybe if we wanted to address this level of detail, we could allow for civilizations that prefer specific and random rare materials.  Now you have to find that stuff, which is cost related, and if you have to be lucky enough to have it on your map as well, which if you dont cheat, is a level of random luck as well.  So cost is higher and supply is pinched, so demand can naturally be higher and the player is rewarded for their investment.  But that's higher level stuff, and still can be overwhelmed if you have dwarves chucking out not just crafts, but hundreds of other items simultaneously.

The most erroneous idea is that the game will get stuck in a cycle of no surplus to invest in capital.  You are sitting on a literal MOUNTAIN of capital.  The only thing you need to do is invest resources (a single dwarf's time to mine) to recover the capital.  It doesn't decay, there is no rent or upkeep, as it stands now.  The game likely needs some more sinks, but even then these are going to work on fortress items (and dwarves) directly, and not the mountain of gems and metal under your feet.  All a player has to do is save, and build, and by building, multiply the advantage of recovered capital.  Thats the game (inside the sanbox).  Right now, that is not a challenge by any means. 

The hardest thing about DF, by a long shot, is learning the interface and all of the possible commands and interactions. 

[Encrtia]

What does the term "sink" mean in this context?

Hopefully the economic situation will help 'guide' the player towards making the right decisions as to what to get their dwarves to do.  If you have a world where there is already a glut of stone crafts, the caravan would not accept stone crafts but it would accept food, meaning the player would end up growing a surplus food rather than crafting a surplus of crafts.

But wouldn't that mean I'd have a mountain of wares I'm unable to remove beyond Atom Smashing? I'd correct you by saying the price of such crafts would merely diminish as a product of supply & demand. I should never be denied to sell good because you think it'd make the game more fun. It'd only be acceptable for very specific reasons; Elves & wood.

In regards to all this surplus talk, I would like to agree that the farm-plot yields or time-per-yield needs to be balanced as a result of over-production. (I.e. 1x7 plot feeds fortress. Unrealistic.)
In regards to all this surplus talk, I'd prefer clothing wasn't a "needs to be replaced every 6 months chore", as it's not a fun game mechanic. I'd prefer at least annually, preferably bi-annually or more. In my head (not necessarily yours) that's more realistic, but also in my head, I'm not being burdened with another chore. We could simulate the need to use toilets, the need for regular clothing, the need for snacks to provided, the need for nutrition levels to be maintained by specified varied diets alternating as the biology of the Dwarf changes due to age & environment, the need to have Dwarrows apply for jobs instead of being assigned - including an interview process & references, etc. but beyond the coding, is that really fun to the average player?

You can buy out the caravan with ease before you even have a functional military as it stands.

I don't see the dealio. A fortress was made, & someone was designated from day one (6 months worth of merchandise) to produce trade goods. The player had a choice of either focusing on the economy, which was done here, or the military. I don't think these goods should be denied to be sold. The best & most logical outcome would, as previously mentioned, be a change of Supply & Demand in addition to perhaps price tweaking. Despite my interest to divulge more, there is no working economy, so it's irrelevant.
In an attempt to keep it short 'n' sweet: The World starts with set total values. When you sell, if there's a shortage/surplus, your price will increase/decrease- possibly beyond the current set-up (meaning buy-outs should still occur). Your caravan-to-caravan buy/sell actions either have a big impact on the market value (as there's only 1 other civilization) or little to no impact (as your 50 Dwarrows [1 Dwarf's worth of work] Merchandise occupy 1 Fort amongst the 10k other Dwarrows in the world).
Realism for the win, in my books. Simulation, even.

it will be interesting to see merchants not taking crafts or any useless junk because the mountainhome is facing a war and requires food, armor or weapons, not trinkets.

As a clever merchant, I don't care if there's a war, & there's Always a war in Dwarf Fortress, I'm still going to buy & sell these luxury goods that are Very important to the inhabitants of this land - just as it is in our land, otherwise Gold wouldn't be trading at £940 per ounce. In addition, it's simply important for the economy. More trading means more wealth. Just because a nation needs military gear, doesn't mean it doesn't need a source of funding (being trade goods in this case as there is little input from conventional currencies). They could take your luxury trade goods as a form of payment, be it indirectly or directly, to fund the production of military gear.

The hardest thing about DF, by a long shot, is learning the interface and all of the possible commands and interactions.

FPS Mastery.

[daggaz]

A sink in game-design terms (sorry I didnt define it earlier) is any mechanic which removes a resource from the game permanently.  Item wear is a sink.  Trading items away to the caravan is technically a sink, except you can get a net return on that mechanic so the net mechanic is not a sink.  Atom smashing is a sink.  Lol, falling into magma is, usually, a sink.

If you put one dwarf on production, you can easily build up a military with any number of your remaining dwarves and this military will, except in the worst of embarks (which are meant to be challenging and which players choose because the rest of the  game simply isnt), be able to withstand all but the most unlucky of early assaults (you can always get raped by a flock of giant keas about five minutes into unloading your wagon).  You can also simply wall yourself in and live forever or until your army can deal with them.   Now if you can trade, that one dwarf is more than enough to gut the very first caravan of any useful items.  If I bring a professional mechanic, for example, I can spam mechanisms (often producing masterwork items in the first try) and with my fifty or so mechanisms produced by fall, buy all the useful raw metal bars and all the food (if I need it) and all the booze and anything I might want for moods and anything I might need for a hospital I havent produced yet and hey throw in that yak in a platinum cage while you are at it, would you Urist?  Easy.  The elven caravan I can just buy outright.  Its a joke. 

I'm not saying in my proposal that you shouldn't be able to buy anything, but it should be much harder, and it should incur some more important and difficult choices.  For example, what skills do you purchase on embark.  Currently the pre-game is all about the fun of optimization, its not about actually surviving  any real challenge other than self-imposed challenges like no pics on an evil embark etc.   The fact that so many of these artificial player challenges exist in the first place, is evidence of the problem.  So again, better to make it a hard decision.  Now you want to make sure you put some points into crafting, because unskilled just isnt going to get you very far in the first year, but professional isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card, either.   

As for your suggestions about supply and demand, well absolutely, I agree they should be implemented too.  But in addition to base modifications of production. 

As for your point about FPS.... you got me there 

[Encrtia]

Thanks for clarifying.

Yes, I get your point. I think, perhaps, mechanisms should just get a lowered value in this instance (they're clearly an abundant & cheap resource, with little value in their quality), but trade goods are more complicated... I also understand & enjoy the proposed idea that embarks require a bit more planning. I personally don't care what points I allocate to Dwarrows at the start, as it really doesn't affect my gameplay... and I always play in Savage biomes.
Nice point on the self-imposed challenges as well.

I think I'll just hush-hush now until the Economy-patch comes out; lots of interesting points raised & I've shared my thoughts (though am conflicted now ).