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[GoblinCookie]

And I for one would be fine with that. If the goblins are currently active in my corner of the world, I would prefer that caravans avoid that unsafe area entirely, rather than see them enter my map and immediately die to an ambush squad. And if the caravan doesn't come because there simply isn't enough economic incentive yet . . . then I'll just have to send my own, to get things started.

You are not quite understanding what the problem is.  The problem is that merchants, caravans, shops and so on are all inherently economic inefficiencies, they exist because the differences in the comparative advantage of two places is greater than the inefficiency of the traders themselves.  In other words, one place is able to produce something so much better than the other place that it makes sense for the traders to move stuff from one place to the other despite their own cost.

The problem is that trade also perpetuates the economic imbalances that it depends upon.  If I cannot trade for everything and neither can anyone else, then everyone potentially ends up developing their own production *of* everything to the point there is insufficient comparative advantage for anyone to ever benefit from trading.  When you eventually send off your caravan from your isolated fortress you find out that everyone else has in fact managed to do everything without you within the existing trade routes and your contribution is not needed. 

     Gotta disagree with you there, as finished goods have been successfully traded for pretty much EVER. Arabian jewelry ends up in Viking graves. Greco-Roman statues shipped to England. Dutch pottery gets sent to Indonesia. To say nothing of all the Bibles that have been shoved into every corner of the globe. And these examples are all pre-Industrial Revolution. And even long afterward, there still continues to be a market for finished goods: The prairie settler visits the general store and buys a good steel plowshare. Or a mouth organ for his kid. Or a dress made of printed fabric for his wife. Or a pocket watch. Or a gun. Because these are goods that 99.9% of people cannot make for themselves, as their skills are all focused in other areas, so these items MUST be imported. And what do the settlers send back in return? Grain. Lumber. Cattle. Metal ingots, if they live in a mining town. It's finished goods from the city, traded for raw materials from the country, like I said earlier.

Arabian jewelry ends up in the Viking graves, but not because there is some factory in Cairo churning out said jewelry for export to Scandanavia, this happens because vikings move around the place and some goods tend to have a long shelf life.  In any case, what I was saying was something far more complex, it is not that finished goods cannot be traded but that they end up being worth nothing more than the materials they are made of + the value of the labour they involved.  At the moment the value of labour is the same everywhere (nothing) resulting in a situation where finished goods are actually worth no more than their materials.  If you want wood, you will accept a number of wooden chairs but you actually value them as equal to the wood they are made of, so it is pointless to make wooden chairs for export as a wood-producing area. 

Also where did all individuals come from?  Yes individuals are not capable of producing everything themselves, but in fortress mode we do not play as individuals but a group of ultimately around 200 individuals.  When we have a group that large there is someone in our group capable of producing pretty much everything it is that our group needs, it also does not cost us anything because that individual would consume no less if he did nothing at all.

It actually all comes down the fact the social structure is Tribal rather than Feudal, what I was discussing with Sarmatian123 earlier.  We need to split everything up into a large number of independent small households scattered over a wide area (Feudal social structure) in order for many of economic things we take for granted (does this include shops?) to even make sense. 

     What's important, though, is to remember that the flow makes no sense in the opposite direction: No one is going to ship copies of a movie produced in Laos, in trade for rice that was grown in Hollywood. That would literally be like shipping coals to Newcastle. (Fun Fact: Coal actually WAS once shipped to Newcastle. A fully-loaded barge had just left the city when a coal-workers' strike began, leaving most of the city with little access to heat. When word of this reached the captain, he promptly turned his ship around, docked, and sold his coal at a good profit.) Which is Reason #1 why any caravan heading right back to the Mountainhome absolutely should NOT want your damn -mug- . . . but the hill dwarves might.

Why would the hill dwarves want you mug?  They are another large group of people who are quite capable of making their own mugs.  Here we come to the crux of the problem, what we have here is the game enforcing specialization, which is okay from the player's POV because they are unplayable.  The hill dwarves *must* only farm vegetables, they *must* not make stuff because that would mean they are not properly hill dwarves but fortress dwarves.

Here we have the upcoming starting scenarios prison-like nature.  The starting scenario *says* I am a mining colony, that means I must *not* farm because that is my starting scenario dammit.  This situation then allows the economy to work in the unnatural way that we want it too (we want a tribal economy to function as a feudal or capitalist one would), since the fact I am forced to never farm and the hillocks are forced to never mine means there is a reliable comparative advantage driving trade.  If I am a mining colony and I start farming, growing enough to feed my dwarves, then the hillocks vegetables suddenly become worthless but they are forced to do nothing but farm by their definition.

     I may not have made myself clear. The importance of Shops is not the difference between stockpiles--I agree, that would be irrelevant. The importance of Shops is the difference between on the map and off the map, the difference between fortress-owned and foreign-owned. And everybody can't "simply take goods directly from the depot" because, half the time, the items wen't delivered to the Trade Depot--they were delivered to the Shop. And the other half of the time, just because the broker could have bought them doesn't mean that she did. Put the sock DOWN, Urist. Move along.
     Now, as I said earlier, there are circumstances where Shops would be a zero-sum game, where your own dwarves selling your own stuff to your own dwarves would be, essentially, doing a lot of work to just move stuff from one stockpile to another. Pointless. (In that setup, the only possible advantage would be convenience: If a dwarf wants a cave spider silk tunic, he doesn't have to ask 199 people, "Do you have a cave spider silk tunic you'd like to trade", he can just go to the Big & Short store, they'll probably have his exact size.) But if goods cross the map edge, or their ownership changes, as a result of the trade, then Shops DO serve a purpose.

There is a difference between shops and shop-tills. 

At the moment the fortress does not need shops because it *is* a shop; our shop-till is really the trade depot and the actual shop is the fortress stockpiles in general.  The distinction is confused by how quantum stockpiling is used in the trade depot allows us to cram all our export items into one 5X5 area, but if things were mechanically more realistic there would be less distinction between the trade depot and an ordinary stockpile.  What we think of as the trade depot would then clearly be the shop-till, rather than the shop.

Since the fortress stockpiles collectively really are a shop, there is no need for specific shops in fortress mode.  Extra shop-tills might be needed under certain scenarios, but they are still all part of one shop as it were. 

Fair enough, although who says they have to come above ground? (Answer: Toady does, at least for now.) If we're able to send warriors to specific locations off the map, then we should also be able to send merchants, with caravan guards. We should be able to send missionaries. And we should be able to send Miners, to dig a (reasonably shallow) road that connects their hamlet with our city, without fear of ambush. It would also double as a safe escape route: If their town gets overrun by enemies, they have a direct path to a secure fortress.

Remember that the easier it is for them to get to *our* fortress, the less need we have to build shops.  The idea I had was to have the fortress build shops in the surrounding hillocks and ship goods off to them, this would work because the hill dwarves prefer to get the goods locally than have to all walk to the fortress.  The problem I then realized was that isn't the hillocks *also* a shop?  The produce of the hillocks must be stockpiled, which means that they already have a building to store stuff.  So why are we building shops *in* the hillocks when they like us are also already a shop?

[SixOfSpades]

The problem is that merchants, caravans, shops and so on . . . exist because the differences in the comparative advantage of two places is greater than the inefficiency of the traders themselves.  The problem is that trade also perpetuates the economic imbalances that it depends upon.

     While I agree that those are real-world economic problems (and certainly ones perpetuating global hunger through food waste), I disagree that replicating them in DF would be a problem, because that's the way our world always has worked, and how fantasy worlds have always been represented, so that's what we expect to see in the game. I cannot see how "solving" these problems in-game would constitute an improvement. DF is not meant to represent an idyllic dwarven utopia.

If I cannot trade for everything and neither can anyone else, then everyone potentially ends up developing their own production *of* everything to the point there is insufficient comparative advantage for anyone to ever benefit from trading.  When you eventually send off your caravan from your isolated fortress you find out that everyone else has in fact managed to do everything without you within the existing trade routes and your contribution is not needed.

     Umm . . . that boils down to "If trade is impossible, then trade is unnecessary", which is pretty much a tautology. But let's explore the idea of an isolated fort with zero trade. Naturally, they would develop all critical industries--because if they didn't, the fort obviously wouldn't survive. But that doesn't mean they would have to develop ALL industries: trades like glassblowing, woodcrafting, fishing, beekeeping, pottery, animal training, etc., frequently get ignored, even in forts with ample opportunity to exploit them. So suppose a civilization manages to make contact with this isolated fort, they might very well find that there's enough difference in tech development (and curiosity about each other's strange new practices) to warrant a modest amount of long-term trade.

Arabian jewelry ends up in the Viking graves, but not because there is some factory in Cairo churning out said jewelry for export to Scandanavia, this happens because vikings move around the place and some goods tend to have a long shelf life.  In any case, what I was saying was something far more complex, it is not that finished goods cannot be traded but that they end up being worth nothing more than the materials they are made of + the value of the labour they involved.

     Okay, most of that was factually inaccurate. True, it's highly unlikely that the ring I was thinking of was produced specifically for export, but one cannot dispute that both the Arabic and Viking cultures were quite famous for the vast extent of their trading empires, with various finished goods being among their most prized commodities. And because Vikings had a perfectly good metalworking tradition of their own, the ring was most likely considered valuable precisely because it was foreign and exotic.

. . . finished goods are actually worth no more than their materials.  If you want wood, you will accept a number of wooden chairs but you actually value them as equal to the wood they are made of, so it is pointless to make wooden chairs for export as a wood-producing area.

     In neither DF nor the real world is that true. If you had said metal, then yes, sometimes I'll trade for finished goods of a desired metal expressly so I can melt them down. But that's the exception.

. . . Any caravan heading right back to the Mountainhome absolutely should NOT want your damn -mug- . . . but the hill dwarves might.

Why would the hill dwarves want you mug?  They are another large group of people who are quite capable of making their own mugs.  Here we come to the crux of the problem, what we have here is the game enforcing specialization . . . The hill dwarves *must* only farm vegetables, they *must* not make stuff because that would mean they are not properly hill dwarves but fortress dwarves.

     I assume the hill dwarves live in all those "Dwarven Hillocks" settlements (with Population ~100) visible in my [c]ivilization screen. Going by the wiki, they don't exactly seem to be powerhouses of industry--indeed, while I don't know what workshops they have in that "Civic Mound", I'd be surprised if the locals pursued much beyond the scope of basic sustenance. Which, if it's true, might feel like an overly strict artificial limitation--then again, it might not, as it certainly mirrors the real-world medieval standard of most peasants being locked into a life of nothing but subsistence farming (and being drafted into the army). In which case, loading the caravan down with cheap crafts would not be an abuse, because if it's heading for the hillocks (and not the Mountainhome), it would almost certainly find a demand there for your finished goods. We know that the caravan will return to the Mountainhome eventually (because if you offer something as tribute, "I will make sure our leader gets this offering"), but that's no guarantee that it will be the caravan's next stop.

There is a difference between shops and shop-tills. 
At the moment the fortress does not need shops because it *is* a shop; our shop-till is really the trade depot and the actual shop is the fortress stockpiles in general.

     Games of semantics, is it? Very well--your metaphor would be an operable one if we could sell goods that aren't physically at the Trade Depot at the time of sale. But we can't, so it's not.

Since the fortress stockpiles collectively really are a shop, there is no need for specific shops in fortress mode. . . .
I then realized was that isn't the hillocks *also* a shop? . . . So why are we building shops *in* the hillocks when they like us are also already a shop?

Okay. Everything is now a shop. The name of the game has officially been changed to "Slaves to Armok: God of Commerce Chapter II: Dwarf Shop". I'll notify Toady and Threetoe.

[Pancakes]

     We could also utilize some features that were just added, namely sending dwarves out from the fortress. We could create a trade mission, to a specific area, select the goods to be traded, and desired items/item types. When it comes to weight, we could actually use horses/mules/etc as work animals to help haul goods, and use wagons when they get implemented better. Ethics might also play a role, such as trying to send your dwarves out with wood to an elven site. The elves may simply not trade with you, cease sending their caravan if they were grievously offended, or attack the dwarves who were sent out in the first place.

Just my two cents on how it could use existing code, and expand the new feature.

[GoblinCookie]

     While I agree that those are real-world economic problems (and certainly ones perpetuating global hunger through food waste), I disagree that replicating them in DF would be a problem, because that's the way our world always has worked, and how fantasy worlds have always been represented, so that's what we expect to see in the game. I cannot see how "solving" these problems in-game would constitute an improvement. DF is not meant to represent an idyllic dwarven utopia.

Agreed, however it is one thing when the economic problems effect the AI but another thing when the problems effect the player.  The players are going to be pissed when after spending however much work on breaking free of isolation they find that the mountain of goods they have specially made for export are of no value to the rest of the world. 

     Umm . . . that boils down to "If trade is impossible, then trade is unnecessary", which is pretty much a tautology. But let's explore the idea of an isolated fort with zero trade. Naturally, they would develop all critical industries--because if they didn't, the fort obviously wouldn't survive. But that doesn't mean they would have to develop ALL industries: trades like glassblowing, woodcrafting, fishing, beekeeping, pottery, animal training, etc., frequently get ignored, even in forts with ample opportunity to exploit them. So suppose a civilization manages to make contact with this isolated fort, they might very well find that there's enough difference in tech development (and curiosity about each other's strange new practices) to warrant a modest amount of long-term trade.

No, they will naturally develop all the industries because once they have set up all the critical industries there is nothing to do with their surplus value except set up more less critical industries, until the dwarves have everything they actually want to have.  This is because traders 'eat up' surplus value, to put it in game terms you spend all your dwarves time making stuff in order to sell to the caravan which means you they do not have time to set up the industries, in addition to not needing to do so. 

Isolation means we need to make everything ourselves, but also gives us the means to do so.  Thus the only trade that will happen between two formerly isolated communities is trade in the raw materials that are abundant in one community and scarce in the other.  The problem is if one of the communities found an 'easier' source of those raw materials before isolation was ended. 

     Okay, most of that was factually inaccurate. True, it's highly unlikely that the ring I was thinking of was produced specifically for export, but one cannot dispute that both the Arabic and Viking cultures were quite famous for the vast extent of their trading empires, with various finished goods being among their most prized commodities. And because Vikings had a perfectly good metalworking tradition of their own, the ring was most likely considered valuable precisely because it was foreign and exotic.

I was not talking about real-life when I said manufactured goods are a bad bet for export.  Real-life has additional elements like 'this item is valuable because it is exotic', which may or may not be introduced into the game. 

     In neither DF nor the real world is that true. If you had said metal, then yes, sometimes I'll trade for finished goods of a desired metal expressly so I can melt them down. But that's the exception.

No it is not the exception at all, the game's value mechanic thinks that the finished goods are more valuable than the raw materials.  In the game's real economic terms however the raw materials are more valuable than the finished goods, if you want a chair you would accept either a chair or a suitable log to make a chair as being of essentially equal value, but if you don't want a chair but a table you would rather have the log than a chair.  The complicated bit is that if you have a labour shortage (not present DF in most cases) then you will prefer finished goods. 

From the perspective of a logging site if it decides to make chairs and exports them then there is a good chance that a realistic economic AI or the player will not want wooden chairs at the moment.  If it exports the logs then not only does this free up more dwarves to fell more trees, but it also has a greater chance of actually being able to sell their logs at a decent price. 

Yes this principle functions in real-life.  This is one reason why we end up harvesting raw materials in some wilderness and then shipping them thousands of miles to a factory on the other side of the world to be turned into finished goods.  Which are then often shipped back to the same wilderness in an environmental nightmare of uber-inefficiency. 

     I assume the hill dwarves live in all those "Dwarven Hillocks" settlements (with Population ~100) visible in my [c]ivilization screen. Going by the wiki, they don't exactly seem to be powerhouses of industry--indeed, while I don't know what workshops they have in that "Civic Mound", I'd be surprised if the locals pursued much beyond the scope of basic sustenance. Which, if it's true, might feel like an overly strict artificial limitation--then again, it might not, as it certainly mirrors the real-world medieval standard of most peasants being locked into a life of nothing but subsistence farming (and being drafted into the army). In which case, loading the caravan down with cheap crafts would not be an abuse, because if it's heading for the hillocks (and not the Mountainhome), it would almost certainly find a demand there for your finished goods. We know that the caravan will return to the Mountainhome eventually (because if you offer something as tribute, "I will make sure our leader gets this offering"), but that's no guarantee that it will be the caravan's next stop.

I mentioned game-enforced specialisation and then you simply describe how it is presently implemented in the game!  Yes, hillocks are a present example of game-enforced specialisation, the problem currently it that it does not work both ways and would suck for the player if it did!

It does not matter what peasants in medieval feudal times did because we are not in those times!  As already discussed (and you ignored) we are functionally a Tribal Society not a Feudal One and this distinction absolutely matters!  A large group of people (both hillocks and our fortress are this) like a tribe is does not inherently have the limitations that an individual nuclear family unit has.  The reason for the feudal peasants mostly doing nothing but subsistence farming is that as individual families they are economically limited in a way that a random group of people are not and this limitation is what ultimately results in the urban-rural division we take for granted.

What the devs seem to be planning to do is use game-enforced specialisation to force their own Tribal society to economically behave as a Feudal society naturally would.  There is no economic reason why the tribes in the hillocks would confine themselves to farming stuff when they are quite capable of producing a wider range of goods, unless we were ourselves to be mechanically prevented from producing sufficient food to feed ourselves. 

If we can produce enough food in our own fortress to feed ourselves and we do not have a re-sale market for the food that the hillocks produces then why would the hillocks not manufacture their own stuff?  But if they can do this, what was the economic point of the whole concept of minor sites/villages in the first place, why not just have the sites do everything that it economically makes sense to?

     Games of semantics, is it? Very well--your metaphor would be an operable one if we could sell goods that aren't physically at the Trade Depot at the time of sale. But we can't, so it's not.

We can only work on that basis because of quantum stockpiling.  I surmise that quantum stockpiling is not intended to be the long-term situation in the game.  Yes that was the point I made, the quantum stockpiling allows all the goods to be stored in the till, meaning some of us end up confusing the concept of shop with the concept of shop-till.  Economically it is the shop's function as a stockpile not the shop-till that is interesting.

Okay. Everything is now a shop. The name of the game has officially been changed to "Slaves to Armok: God of Commerce Chapter II: Dwarf Shop". I'll notify Toady and Threetoe.

 

[Sarmatian123]

We can only work on that basis because of quantum stockpiling.  I surmise that quantum stockpiling is not intended to be the long-term situation in the game.  Yes that was the point I made, the quantum stockpiling allows all the goods to be stored in the till, meaning some of us end up confusing the concept of shop with the concept of shop-till.  Economically it is the shop's function as a stockpile not the shop-till that is interesting.

Yup, I agree. Doing entirely away with quantum stockpiling would be disastrous for DF's fps. One of the reasons I suggested using both "trade depot" and "treasury workshop" as forms of such stockpiles hiding items from active tracking by the game.

[SixOfSpades]

The players are going to be pissed when after spending however much work on breaking free of isolation they find that the mountain of goods they have specially made for export are of no value to the rest of the world.

     Not necessarily. As I said earlier, whatever civilization you contact might very well have taken a quite different industrial path, in which case they could find your goods pretty darn neat. Or, their industries could even be exactly the same but certain cultural rules apply there--for instance, their nobles and military may have made it illegal for hill dwarves to own metal armor. So, for many years, your fort could do TONS of business secretly supplying them with metal armor, and your Armorers will be hailed as heroes after the revolution.

No, they will naturally develop all the industries because once they have set up all the critical industries there is nothing to do with their surplus value except set up more less critical industries, until the dwarves have everything they actually want to have.  This is because traders 'eat up' surplus value, to put it in game terms you spend all your dwarves time making stuff in order to sell to the caravan which means you they do not have time to set up the industries, in addition to not needing to do so.

     You make some very curious assumptions about how people play this game. Granted, there is an element of "Okay, what next? Guess I'll set up a Kiln, just for the heck of it", but have you never heard of a megaproject? Or digging deep? Or sending your army out to war? There are plenty of things to occupy the player, other than setting up all the industries for no purpose but having all the industries. And I'm pretty damn sure that no player has EVER said to himself, "Oh, I'd love to get my Hospital up & running, but we need the fort's entire labor force making stuff for export."

Isolation means we need to make everything ourselves, but also gives us the means to do so.  Thus the only trade that will happen between two formerly isolated communities is trade in the raw materials that are abundant in one community and scarce in the other.

     I grant you that trading raw materials is mutually beneficial, even if it's only in one direction: I pay extra for the large quantity of exotic material, true, but because it's my artisans doing the skilled labor, it's my economy that receives most of the benefit. But in no way does that mean that raw materials are the ONLY thing worth trading, not by a damned sight. Suppose the resource that one of these isolated communities lacked access to was weapons-grade metals. Are you really suggesting that they would have NO interest in the sharp steel swords and morningstars toted by their new trading partners, they would prefer to develop their own metalworking industry, entirely from scratch? Sure, it's quite doable in DF (just give some random Peasant permission to build a Forge, and sooner or later she'll get a mood), but that's extremely unrealistic, and frankly a bit cheesy & abusive.

I was not talking about real-life when I said manufactured goods are a bad bet for export.

     Well, if you were just talking about the game, then you would still be incorrect. Not only are finished goods the most efficient way to turn a good profit through export, but in my opinion they should remain so--as long as they are being sent to a location where there's a worthy market for them. This is literally the way almost every market economy, real or fictional, has worked since the dawn of mercantilism, I don't know why you insist on having a problem with that.

. . . finished goods are actually worth no more than their materials.  If you want wood, you will accept a number of wooden chairs but you actually value them as equal to the wood they are made of, so it is pointless to make wooden chairs for export as a wood-producing area.

     In neither DF nor the real world is that true. If you had said metal, then yes, sometimes I'll trade for finished goods of a desired metal expressly so I can melt them down. But that's the exception.

No it is not the exception at all, the game's value mechanic thinks that the finished goods are more valuable than the raw materials.  In the game's real economic terms however the raw materials are more valuable than the finished goods, if you want a chair you would accept either a chair or a suitable log to make a chair as being of essentially equal value, but if you don't want a chair but a table you would rather have the log than a chair.

     That's pretty much the exact opposite of what you said earlier--but I can easily forgive the occasional brain fart, I'm certainly not immune to them myself. Your second quote was far more accurate. Yes, the game does consider finished goods to be more valuable than their constituent materials, even when worked with zero quality--because they will be taken to where they literally ARE worth more, as demand is higher there, so there's nothing wrong with that (apart from why anyone would buy something with zero quality).

The complicated bit is that if you have a labour shortage (not present DF in most cases) then you will prefer finished goods.

     A labor shortage or a patience shortage. My current fort is just under 2 years old, I'm not thinking about the frivolous stuff like musical instruments yet. So I don't have the time to figure out what the heck a "kirar" is or how to make it, for me it's far more convenient to just buy one, and assume at least one of my dwarves will know how to play the dang thing.

I'd be surprised if the [hill dwarves] pursued much beyond the scope of basic sustenance. Which, if it's true, might feel like an overly strict artificial limitation--then again, it might not, as it certainly mirrors the real-world medieval standard of most peasants being locked into a life of nothing but subsistence farming (and being drafted into the army).

I mentioned game-enforced specialisation and then you simply describe how it is presently implemented in the game!  Yes, hillocks are a present example of game-enforced specialisation, the problem currently it that it does not work both ways and would suck for the player if it did!

     If you think I had previously argued that "industry denial" did not exist, I don't remember doing so. (Correct me if I'm wrong, though.) Indeed, I believe the only point I made regarding the subject is that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Where you seem to think that "any population sufficiently large can and therefore will develop every industry," I see absolutely nothing fundamentally wrong with making rural life be just the same for dwarves as it's been for humans throughout pre-industrial history. As for whether it "would suck for the player if it did", I think you're probably right on that score. But hey, if Toady does make a "Hillock" starting scenario, maybe people will still play it. Armok knows we've had plenty of far weirder embark restrictions.

As already discussed (and you ignored) we are functionally a Tribal Society not a Feudal One and this distinction absolutely matters!

     I ignored it partly because it didn't interest me. Until & unless Toady makes a firm decision that outwardly affects the game, your dwarves will live in the kind of society that you want, while my dwarves will live in the kind of society that I want.

The reason for the feudal peasants mostly doing nothing but subsistence farming is that as individual families they are economically limited in a way that a random group of people are not and this limitation is what ultimately results in the urban-rural division we take for granted.

     When you say "random group of people", what precisely do you mean? Do you mean 50 names plucked at random from the unit list of a maxed-out and fully diverse fort? So, one Presser, one Jeweler, one Macedwarf, one Surgeon, one Bookbinder, one Mechanic, one Weaponsmith, one Engraver, one Animal Dissector, etc.? If so, you're going to have to explain how all of these people acquired their highly specialized skills in a setting that fully suggests the near-total absence of opportunities to either learn or use most of those skills.

There is no economic reason why the tribes in the hillocks would confine themselves to farming stuff when they are quite capable of producing a wider range of goods

     Are you trying to condemn the ridiculous over-fertility of Farm Plots, while simultaneously using that over-fertility to justify the early and widespread specialization of labors outside agriculture? The (incredibly persuasive) reason for hill dwarves to confine themselves to farming should be because they really like not starving.

     Just to be clear, I'm not trying to make the case that DF must be a reasonably faithful (if fanciful) re-creation of medieval European feudalism. I'm simply saying that most existing fantasy works & games operate on that background, people expect DF to use that background, and indeed the game does seem to already run (largely) on that background. Maybe in the future, Toady will give the hill dwarves the ability to learn every trade. But in the current version, that does not seem to be the case, and I am not at all convinced that changing it would enrich the game. Just as I am not convinced that dragging this debate further & further from the original post will be of any benefit whatsoever to the quality of the suggestion.

[GoblinCookie]

     Not necessarily. As I said earlier, whatever civilization you contact might very well have taken a quite different industrial path, in which case they could find your goods pretty darn neat. Or, their industries could even be exactly the same but certain cultural rules apply there--for instance, their nobles and military may have made it illegal for hill dwarves to own metal armor. So, for many years, your fort could do TONS of business secretly supplying them with metal armor, and your Armorers will be hailed as heroes after the revolution.

Problem is that we need a means in fortress mode to actually find out all that information.  In any case I never said there would be no opportunities, just that is rather likely that the world will 'move' on without you if if you are isolated and this is indeed rather realistic so not actually inherently a problem.

It is a problem however that the devs seem set up a course of enforced specialisation, making sites do something specific from the start.  What happens if a site which is forcibly specialised is isolated from the wider society?  Does it revert back into a generic site along the lines of what we have already in fortress mode?  But if does so then why build the game economy around starting scenarios at all, as opposed to having generic sites that later specialise according to their comparative advantages and the wider economic situation?

     You make some very curious assumptions about how people play this game. Granted, there is an element of "Okay, what next? Guess I'll set up a Kiln, just for the heck of it", but have you never heard of a megaproject? Or digging deep? Or sending your army out to war? There are plenty of things to occupy the player, other than setting up all the industries for no purpose but having all the industries. And I'm pretty damn sure that no player has EVER said to himself, "Oh, I'd love to get my Hospital up & running, but we need the fort's entire labor force making stuff for export."

I never said that the player would set up all the industries, but it is the case is it not generally the case that later on the game the player has a larger number of industries than they have at the beginning? 

     I grant you that trading raw materials is mutually beneficial, even if it's only in one direction: I pay extra for the large quantity of exotic material, true, but because it's my artisans doing the skilled labor, it's my economy that receives most of the benefit. But in no way does that mean that raw materials are the ONLY thing worth trading, not by a damned sight. Suppose the resource that one of these isolated communities lacked access to was weapons-grade metals. Are you really suggesting that they would have NO interest in the sharp steel swords and morningstars toted by their new trading partners, they would prefer to develop their own metalworking industry, entirely from scratch? Sure, it's quite doable in DF (just give some random Peasant permission to build a Forge, and sooner or later she'll get a mood), but that's extremely unrealistic, and frankly a bit cheesy & abusive.

They will have an interest in the steel swords and the morningstars because they are made of steel.  They would be just as happy to receive steel bars.  From the perspective of the exporter however, there is no point in making weapons at all, because the site they are exporting to is just as happy to have the steel as the steel weapon.  That is the case as long as they have the means to forge metal and they do not have a general labour shortage.  If they do not have the means to forge steel then steel bars are worthless and the weapons are extremely valuable, while if there is a labour shortage the added value is that goods the labourers *would* be making if they were not forcing steel. 

     Well, if you were just talking about the game, then you would still be incorrect. Not only are finished goods the most efficient way to turn a good profit through export, but in my opinion they should remain so--as long as they are being sent to a location where there's a worthy market for them. This is literally the way almost every market economy, real or fictional, has worked since the dawn of mercantilism, I don't know why you insist on having a problem with that.

That is how an industrial economy works, an industrial economy works on the basis that the machinery and infrastructure to make the manufactured goods are scarce and found only in the industrialised core.  This however comes about about 400 years after the devs technological end-date of the 1400s. 

     That's pretty much the exact opposite of what you said earlier--but I can easily forgive the occasional brain fart, I'm certainly not immune to them myself. Your second quote was far more accurate. Yes, the game does consider finished goods to be more valuable than their constituent materials, even when worked with zero quality--because they will be taken to where they literally ARE worth more, as demand is higher there, so there's nothing wrong with that (apart from why anyone would buy something with zero quality).

As I said, it is the distinction between an industrial economy and a pre-industrial economy, I am not contradicting myself.  The pre-industrial parts of the present industrial market economy continue to the operate on the 'export raw materials' system they always had for the exact same reasons they did before, but the industrial centres operates on different principles. 

As I said, if we carefully consider what the actual value of the items is to the player, then the player would rather see raw materials in the caravan than finished goods.  The reason is that, despite their actual value (to the player) being the same the game mistakenly assigns them a lower value. 

     A labor shortage or a patience shortage. My current fort is just under 2 years old, I'm not thinking about the frivolous stuff like musical instruments yet. So I don't have the time to figure out what the heck a "kirar" is or how to make it, for me it's far more convenient to just buy one, and assume at least one of my dwarves will know how to play the dang thing.

The AI does not get bored and 99% of the economy should be the AI.

     If you think I had previously argued that "industry denial" did not exist, I don't remember doing so. (Correct me if I'm wrong, though.) Indeed, I believe the only point I made regarding the subject is that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Where you seem to think that "any population sufficiently large can and therefore will develop every industry," I see absolutely nothing fundamentally wrong with making rural life be just the same for dwarves as it's been for humans throughout pre-industrial history. As for whether it "would suck for the player if it did", I think you're probably right on that score. But hey, if Toady does make a "Hillock" starting scenario, maybe people will still play it. Armok knows we've had plenty of far weirder embark restrictions.

I don't think you have understood pre-industrial peasantry at all.  In medieval society the peasants did not simply grow vegetables and export them to the local town, they also manufactured a lot of goods themselves.  The fact however that not all the peasants could do this to the standard that say professional craftsmen in a town could means that we end up with a localised trade in manufactured goods that eventually allows industrialisation to happen.

The reason this happens is that medieval feudal peasants are economically not, like with the hillocks a unified group of 50-100 people.  If you have a group that big, it is quite easy for the group to acquire the tools and a craftsman to produce all the limited number of manufactured goods the group needs.

     I ignored it partly because it didn't interest me. Until & unless Toady makes a firm decision that outwardly affects the game, your dwarves will live in the kind of society that you want, while my dwarves will live in the kind of society that I want.

You are actually not interested in about the only question there really is.   

The present form of society *is* presently tribal (or perhaps communist) and that is not a matter of what we personally want to see in the game or how we happen to play the game.

You cannot make the society Feudal however much you like.  That is because the structure of society (or the material basis) remains tribal however much Feudal superstructure (or the ideas) you decide to introduce.  I do not have to do anything at all, because the structure is tribal in an objective sense, the presence of feudal ideas while senseless cannot change that.  Ideas like "I should have to work to earn a living" count as superstructure by the way. 

You can play anachronistically on the assumption that you are actually feudal, but you cannot actually make the game a Feudal society.  To actually make the game Feudal would involve changing the fundamental nature of the game. 

     When you say "random group of people", what precisely do you mean? Do you mean 50 names plucked at random from the unit list of a maxed-out and fully diverse fort? So, one Presser, one Jeweler, one Macedwarf, one Surgeon, one Bookbinder, one Mechanic, one Weaponsmith, one Engraver, one Animal Dissector, etc.? If so, you're going to have to explain how all of these people acquired their highly specialized skills in a setting that fully suggests the near-total absence of opportunities to either learn or use most of those skills.

Yes, I mean a regular population arriving from various sources.  If for some reason all the folks that move to a new the hillocks only have farming skills for no apparent reason, then a craftsman becomes extremely valuable there.  Hence a craftsman will be attracted to move there, or one of the surplus farming dwarves will actually even sent to recruit one.  The only thing that would keep the hillocks as a bunch of farmers is a specific mechanic that forces them never to do anything else.   

     Are you trying to condemn the ridiculous over-fertility of Farm Plots, while simultaneously using that over-fertility to justify the early and widespread specialization of labors outside agriculture? The (incredibly persuasive) reason for hill dwarves to confine themselves to farming should be because they really like not starving.

     Just to be clear, I'm not trying to make the case that DF must be a reasonably faithful (if fanciful) re-creation of medieval European feudalism. I'm simply saying that most existing fantasy works & games operate on that background, people expect DF to use that background, and indeed the game does seem to already run (largely) on that background. Maybe in the future, Toady will give the hill dwarves the ability to learn every trade. But in the current version, that does not seem to be the case, and I am not at all convinced that changing it would enrich the game. Just as I am not convinced that dragging this debate further & further from the original post will be of any benefit whatsoever to the quality of the suggestion.

It has nothing to do with the over-productivity of farm-plots at all.  It has to be the case that there a agricultural surplus, or else we will live in a world where there is nothing but specialised farming sites and all races will ultimately go extinct because they cannot feed any children.  Perhaps no agricultural surplus is a possible situation for the uber-nasty worlds though? 

I never said that the hillocks should stop growing vegetables altogether.  I said that it is irrational to force them not to manufacture stuff when they are producing surplus food and they do not have a buyer for that food.  The problem is that rationally, given the social structure the ultimate economic outcome is every site produces everything itself.  Only forced specialisation will stop this and that creates the above mentioned problem.

[SixOfSpades]

It is a problem however that the devs seem set up a course of enforced specialisation, making sites do something specific from the start.  What happens if a site which is forcibly specialised is isolated from the wider society?  Does it revert back into a generic site along the lines of what we have already in fortress mode?  But if does so then why build the game economy around starting scenarios at all, as opposed to having generic sites that later specialise according to their comparative advantages and the wider economic situation?

     I'm not aware of any proposed starting scenario that imposes that sort of constraints. Some will have requirements, sure (such as, "You must tribute 20 bars of copper to us every year"), but that still wouldn't prevent exploring any industries. Now, it's theoretically possible that some day, a dwarven civ could have some cultural or religious prohibitions, such as never cutting gems, or never using birds in any way. But even so, if you should happen to get some really nasty restriction, just change your starting civ, or don't choose that particular starting scenario.

I never said that the player would set up all the industries

Really? Because it sure sounds like you did.

Naturally, they would develop all critical industries--because if they didn't, the fort obviously wouldn't survive. But that doesn't mean they would have to develop ALL industries: trades . . . frequently get ignored, even in forts with ample opportunity to exploit them.

No, they will naturally develop all the industries because once they have set up all the critical industries there is nothing to do with their surplus value except set up more less critical industries.

     And in case you want to claim you were talking about the AI (not a human player), let me remind you that the context was "an isolated fort that makes contact with a civilization". A human can only play as a fort, not a whole civ. And deliberately ignoring certain (permitted) industries is something that only humans do.

Is it not generally the case that later on the game the player has a larger number of industries than they have at the beginning?

     Well, it's certainly far more likely than having fewer industries as the game progresses. But the game still has a few professions that are simply NOT worth setting up, such as Woodcrafting & Waxworking, and others that can be effectively stopped dead in their tracks if your embark site happens to lack access to trees, or water, or sand, or clay. So the number of forts that truly explore every industry is probably a LOT smaller than you seem to think.

Suppose the resource that one of these isolated communities lacked access to was weapons-grade metals. Are you really suggesting that they would have NO interest in the sharp steel swords and morningstars toted by their new trading partners, they would prefer to develop their own metalworking industry, entirely from scratch?

They will have an interest in the steel swords and the morningstars because they are made of steel.  They would be just as happy to receive steel bars.

     Ummm . . . I specified that the isolated fort has ZERO familiarity with weapons-grade metals, and therefore zero familiarity with how to work said metals. They don't even have the concept of a Weaponsmith or Armorsmith. So what precisely are they going to do with a bin full of steel bars?

If they do not have the means to forge steel then steel bars are worthless and the weapons are extremely valuable.

     Okay. Good.

Not only are finished goods the most efficient way to turn a good profit through export, but in my opinion they should remain so--as long as they are being sent to a location where there's a worthy market for them.

That is how an industrial economy works, an industrial economy works on the basis that the machinery and infrastructure to make the manufactured goods are scarce and found only in the industrialised core.  This however comes about about 400 years after the devs technological end-date of the 1400s.

     So, what about all the highly technical and often extremely valuable goods that could be produced only by very skilled (and even more rare) artisans, several hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution, or even the Renaissance? Are you suggesting that the average village had, among its common citizens, people who could produce gold necklaces, or illuminated books, or astrolabes, or mirrors, or perfume, or clocks, or ether, or tapestries? No. These people could be found only where the education was (guild houses, academies, large temples, noble houses), or where the money was (cities, large temples, noble houses). In other words, almost always in the cities.

I am not contradicting myself.

     Making a mistake is not a character flaw. Refusing to admit the mistake is.
What You Said First:

. . . finished goods are actually worth no more than their materials.  If you want wood, you will accept a number of wooden chairs but you actually value them as equal to the wood they are made of . . .

Meaning:
Iteb Olonrakust, broker: "Hey, we're gonna be making some wooden tables. You got any wooden logs to trade?"
Datan Oddomilral, merchant: "Nah, we're fresh out of logs. We've got some wooden chairs, though, could you make tables out of those?"
Iteb Olonrakust: "Sure, those'll work!"
 . . . which is why *I* said "No way is that true, the only exception is metal."

What You Said Next:

. . . raw materials are more valuable than the finished goods, if you want a chair you would accept either a chair or a suitable log to make a chair as being of essentially equal value, but if you don't want a chair but a table you would rather have the log than a chair.

Meaning:
Iteb Olonrakust, broker: "Hey, we're gonna be making some wooden tables. You got any wooden logs to trade?"
Datan Oddomilral, merchant: "Nah, we're fresh out of logs. We've got some wooden chairs, though, could you make tables out of those?"
Iteb Olonrakust:  "Bro, do you even Carpent?!"
 . . . which is why I said your second quote was far more correct than the first.

As I said, if we carefully consider what the actual value of the items is to the player, then the player would rather see raw materials in the caravan than finished goods.

     Agreed, in almost all cases. Although I suspect I'm not alone in having a few items that I'd rather just buy, rather than jump through all the hoops to make myself: If I buy flour & sugar, I can skip all the Farming steps and the Textile steps with one transaction. Also, if DF's skill curves weren't so unrealistically easy to ascend, forts would spend a lot more time in "apprentice mode," and thus have a much longer window in which it's more practical to buy finished goods.

In medieval society the peasants did not simply grow vegetables and export them to the local town, they also manufactured a lot of goods themselves.  The fact however that not all the peasants could do this to the standard that say professional craftsmen in a town could means that we end up with a localised trade in manufactured goods that eventually allows industrialisation to happen.

     True--peasants commonly had a side trade (usually practiced in the off-seasons when there was less farm work to be done) that had nothing (directly) to do with food: Cloth, furniture, simple tools, wagons, rope, pots, candles, a few toys, barrels, some leather goods, etc. The typical rural village might have a specialist or two--usually a tailor, blacksmith (who arguably might be better described as a tinker or farrier), or someone trying their best to be a doctor. But most of this work went either to produce goods only used locally (because they were below the standard of the city-made trade goods), or to produce/repair on a replacement basis only, meaning the net change in items was zero.

The reason this happens is that medieval feudal peasants are economically not, like with the hillocks a unified group of 50-100 people.  If you have a group that big, it is quite easy for the group to acquire the tools and a craftsman to produce all the limited number of manufactured goods the group needs.

     Yes--things needed by the group. Not luxury goods desired by people outside the group. Not bejeweled crowns. Not richly dyed & embroidered silks. Not impeccably detailed statuary. Not perfectly arranged parquetry. Not masterfully-balanced steel swords. Not rich & resonant musical instruments. The village I described directly above could produce pretty much all of the items that its citizens needed. If, by some chance, a peasant village did happen to produce an artisan who could make quality luxury goods, that artisan would quickly move to a city, because that's where he could maximize the profit from his labors. The only major exception would be if the village had a good-sized industry nearby: If it were located near a copper mine, it might have a thriving metalworking industry. A marble quarry would nurture a mason's guild, or some talented sculptors. A forest near the shore might lead to a lot of skilled shipwrights. Etc. But it would have to be one amazing village that had ALL of these resources, and in fact that village would quickly become a city.

     When you say "random group of people", what precisely do you mean? Do you mean 50 names plucked at random from the unit list of a maxed-out and fully diverse fort?

Yes, I mean a regular population arriving from various sources.

     Oh, god. You accuse me of not understanding pre-industrial peasantry, and yet you seem to base your resettlement ideas on DF's migrant waves. If only this forum had a facepalm emoji.
     Okay. If they're anything like rural humans, (most of) the dwarves in the hillocks only have farming skills not "for no apparent reason", but for 4 rather good reasons:
1. Their farming skills enable them to have a decent enough life where they are--relocation is not justified,
2. Their primary skills--farming would be next to useless in a city, and
3. Their secondary skills--various flavors of crafting and its preliminary steps--would not enable them to find a better life in the city.
4. Those dwarves whose non-agricultural skills WERE good enough had a strong motivation to move away.
It may very likely be that Toady is currently using "a specific mechanic that forces them never to do anything else" in order to duplicate the results produced by these 4 well-known and well-documented behaviors, but if so, that kind of placeholder is anything BUT egregious in the world of DF.

     I ignored it partly because it didn't interest me. Until & unless Toady makes a firm decision that outwardly affects the game, your dwarves will live in the kind of society that you want, while my dwarves will live in the kind of society that I want.

You are actually not interested in about the only question there really is.

     The only question that there really is has already been identified as "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" and not some obscure consideration of medieval societies. Hey. Wait a minute. Has this entire wandering tangent been an offshoot of your inexplicable "A clan is a system of government" soapbox from a few months ago? That's it, I'm not listening to one more thing you say about cultural organization--your credibility on that score is long gone, as far as I'm concerned.

[GoblinCookie]

     I'm not aware of any proposed starting scenario that imposes that sort of constraints. Some will have requirements, sure (such as, "You must tribute 20 bars of copper to us every year"), but that still wouldn't prevent exploring any industries. Now, it's theoretically possible that some day, a dwarven civ could have some cultural or religious prohibitions, such as never cutting gems, or never using birds in any way. But even so, if you should happen to get some really nasty restriction, just change your starting civ, or don't choose that particular starting scenario.

If starting scenarios are not restrictive then they whole thing is basically cosmetic but if they are then what is the difference between a starting scenario and a location/structure?  I happen to see potential in merging the two, so that the player in a starting scenario begins as a off-site location of an existing AI controlled site, which naturally means they are restricted in what they can do.  They have explicit conditions they have to meet decided by the site they belong to but when they meet those conditions they can decide to turn themselves into a regular site that can do everything and gets a full range of migrants.  This solves the 'information problem' and gives the player the reason to adopt a starting scenario because it means when the site qualifies for independence the player is going to be essentially guaranteed a market for their developed industry. 

     And in case you want to claim you were talking about the AI (not a human player), let me remind you that the context was "an isolated fort that makes contact with a civilization". A human can only play as a fort, not a whole civ. And deliberately ignoring certain (permitted) industries is something that only humans do.

If I find myself with a large number of idle dwarves then this is likely to drive me to set up new industries, while if I struggle to find enough dwarves to do things then this will keep me from putting the work in that is need to expand my range of industries.  But yes I was talking about the AI not the human player, though the same rules apply to any human player that does not have any objection to setting up a full range of industries. 

     Well, it's certainly far more likely than having fewer industries as the game progresses. But the game still has a few professions that are simply NOT worth setting up, such as Woodcrafting & Waxworking, and others that can be effectively stopped dead in their tracks if your embark site happens to lack access to trees, or water, or sand, or clay. So the number of forts that truly explore every industry is probably a LOT smaller than you seem to think.

It is the fact the number of industries goes up over time that is the problem, not that everyone ends up with all the industries.  The problem is that initially we only have a small range of industries in each site, this leads to trade between the sites happening.  As more industries get set up however, this kills off trade between the sites and the situation accelerates over time.  The reason is it is the amount of surplus value (or surplus dwarf labour hours) that determines the ability of the site to set up new industries.  Trade consumes surplus value, so every time trade is reduced more surplus value is now available in order to set up more industries, meaning even less trade, meaning even more surplus value. 

What I am talking about is the trade between hillocks and fortresses.  Yes, sometimes the environmental differences prevent this universal drive to self-sufficiency, but this does not apply to fortresses and hillocks because they are usually in the same environment. 

     So, what about all the highly technical and often extremely valuable goods that could be produced only by very skilled (and even more rare) artisans, several hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution, or even the Renaissance? Are you suggesting that the average village had, among its common citizens, people who could produce gold necklaces, or illuminated books, or astrolabes, or mirrors, or perfume, or clocks, or ether, or tapestries? No. These people could be found only where the education was (guild houses, academies, large temples, noble houses), or where the money was (cities, large temples, noble houses). In other words, almost always in the cities.

The feudal economy did not work based upon villages producing things and trading them to towns that produced things.  The feudal economy is based upon the local market town, to put things in DF terms the peasant villages are *not* sites but structures that are part of a larger site centered upon a market town structure.  The individual peasant households produce food mostly, consuming some of it themselves, trading or giving some it to their immediate neighbors and traveling to the market to sell the rest on.

The individual craftsmen live in the market town, the reason this is the case is simply that they do not want to have to walk a long way to get to the market to sell their goods and buy raw materials or their own food.  The key thing here is that the towns do not trade with the villages, the individual members of both places produce things individually and trade them at the central market that is in the town.  The individuals choice of location is a question of practicality, the peasants live about the place because they need to get to the fields while the craftsmen live in the market town because they need to be close to the market. 

     Making a mistake is not a character flaw. Refusing to admit the mistake is.
What You Said First:

. . . finished goods are actually worth no more than their materials.  If you want wood, you will accept a number of wooden chairs but you actually value them as equal to the wood they are made of . . .

Meaning:
Iteb Olonrakust, broker: "Hey, we're gonna be making some wooden tables. You got any wooden logs to trade?"
Datan Oddomilral, merchant: "Nah, we're fresh out of logs. We've got some wooden chairs, though, could you make tables out of those?"
Iteb Olonrakust: "Sure, those'll work!"
 . . . which is why *I* said "No way is that true, the only exception is metal."

What You Said Next:

. . . raw materials are more valuable than the finished goods, if you want a chair you would accept either a chair or a suitable log to make a chair as being of essentially equal value, but if you don't want a chair but a table you would rather have the log than a chair.

Meaning:
Iteb Olonrakust, broker: "Hey, we're gonna be making some wooden tables. You got any wooden logs to trade?"
Datan Oddomilral, merchant: "Nah, we're fresh out of logs. We've got some wooden chairs, though, could you make tables out of those?"
Iteb Olonrakust:  "Bro, do you even Carpent?!"
 . . . which is why I said your second quote was far more correct than the first.

  I see what I did wrong. 

The statement 'worth no more than', incorporates 'worth less than'.  If finished goods are worth less than their materials, then raw materials are more valuable than manufactured goods, what I should have said is that finished goods are worth less than their raw materials, not that raw materials are worth more.  Even though both are correct and do not contradict 'worth no more than', the latter gets the point across better because people do not have to flip it over in their head. 

     Agreed, in almost all cases. Although I suspect I'm not alone in having a few items that I'd rather just buy, rather than jump through all the hoops to make myself: If I buy flour & sugar, I can skip all the Farming steps and the Textile steps with one transaction. Also, if DF's skill curves weren't so unrealistically easy to ascend, forts would spend a lot more time in "apprentice mode," and thus have a much longer window in which it's more practical to buy finished goods.

We are talking about potentially 100s of years, not the few years the player is playing.  The skill curves don't matter because the skills will naturally migrate from where they are abundant to where they are scarce, since you are more valuable as the only master smith in a place than as one master smith among a hundred.

     True--peasants commonly had a side trade (usually practiced in the off-seasons when there was less farm work to be done) that had nothing (directly) to do with food: Cloth, furniture, simple tools, wagons, rope, pots, candles, a few toys, barrels, some leather goods, etc. The typical rural village might have a specialist or two--usually a tailor, blacksmith (who arguably might be better described as a tinker or farrier), or someone trying their best to be a doctor. But most of this work went either to produce goods only used locally (because they were below the standard of the city-made trade goods), or to produce/repair on a replacement basis only, meaning the net change in items was zero.

The reason peasants had a side trade is it made more sense for them to make things themselves than to trek all the way to the nearest market town, see above post and because they had a fair amount of down time due to how agriculture works.  If they were particularly good at making things, they simply move 'into' the market town and become proper craftsman.  But in DF, if you are particularly good at something you may spend more time doing that rather than in this case farming, your location does change. 

If the hillocks function as a market for their peasants, which have to since the local fortress may be destroyed, then there is no reason for the craftsman not to move into the hillocks or fail to leave for the fortress to become a craftsman.  As I was saying earlier, the underlying economic structure is crucial and the tribal economic structure of DF creates different outcomes to the Feudal one. 

     Yes--things needed by the group. Not luxury goods desired by people outside the group. Not bejeweled crowns. Not richly dyed & embroidered silks. Not impeccably detailed statuary. Not perfectly arranged parquetry. Not masterfully-balanced steel swords. Not rich & resonant musical instruments. The village I described directly above could produce pretty much all of the items that its citizens needed. If, by some chance, a peasant village did happen to produce an artisan who could make quality luxury goods, that artisan would quickly move to a city, because that's where he could maximize the profit from his labors. The only major exception would be if the village had a good-sized industry nearby: If it were located near a copper mine, it might have a thriving metalworking industry. A marble quarry would nurture a mason's guild, or some talented sculptors. A forest near the shore might lead to a lot of skilled shipwrights. Etc. But it would have to be one amazing village that had ALL of these resources, and in fact that village would quickly become a city.

Nope.  You only need the tools, the materials and the laborers, both of which can be move to wherever they are needed. 

     Oh, god. You accuse me of not understanding pre-industrial peasantry, and yet you seem to base your resettlement ideas on DF's migrant waves. If only this forum had a facepalm emoji.
     Okay. If they're anything like rural humans, (most of) the dwarves in the hillocks only have farming skills not "for no apparent reason", but for 4 rather good reasons:
1. Their farming skills enable them to have a decent enough life where they are--relocation is not justified,
2. Their primary skills--farming would be next to useless in a city, and
3. Their secondary skills--various flavors of crafting and its preliminary steps--would not enable them to find a better life in the city.
4. Those dwarves whose non-agricultural skills WERE good enough had a strong motivation to move away.
It may very likely be that Toady is currently using "a specific mechanic that forces them never to do anything else" in order to duplicate the results produced by these 4 well-known and well-documented behaviors, but if so, that kind of placeholder is anything BUT egregious in the world of DF.

The outcome will not come about unless a specific mechanic exists to force it too.  The fortresses *are* farms already, which means there is no reason for a farming dwarf to move out to the hillocks, for reasons already discussed there is no reason for a crafting dwarf to move to the fortress from the hillocks and therefore there is no reason for hillocks not to be 'factories' as it were.  This means the only economic difference between the two, minus specific mechanics to force them to specialize would basically be the architecture. 

     The only question that there really is has already been identified as "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" and not some obscure consideration of medieval societies. Hey. Wait a minute. Has this entire wandering tangent been an offshoot of your inexplicable "A clan is a system of government" soapbox from a few months ago? That's it, I'm not listening to one more thing you say about cultural organization--your credibility on that score is long gone, as far as I'm concerned.

Yes, you were right about clans; your being right is what led to my current position.  Clans are not governments, they are groups of people that have or do not have a government. 

[SixOfSpades]

I'll begin this by saying that in the interest of not wasting any more of anyone's time on digressions, I'll only be replying to issues that directly affect the original post--the way the fort experiences trade.

The feudal economy did not work based upon villages producing things and trading them to towns that produced things.  The feudal economy is based upon the local market town.  The individual peasant households produce food mostly, consuming some of it themselves, trading or giving some it to their immediate neighbors and traveling to the market to sell the rest on. The individual craftsmen live in the market town . . . The key thing here is that the towns do not trade with the villages, the individual members of both places produce things individually and trade them at the central market that is in the town.

     Setting the market town as a middleman between the villages/hillocks and the cities/fortresses? Very well, though I don't know what's to be gained by that step (in DF terms). I suppose it might agree with the default caravan's "a little of everything" inventory; the way how, in the absence of a trade agreement, caravans are a mix of raw materials & finished goods, not markedly suggestive of having just come from the city OR the country.

if DF's skill curves weren't so unrealistically easy to ascend, forts would spend a lot more time in "apprentice mode," and thus have a much longer window in which it's more practical to buy finished goods.

We are talking about potentially 100s of years, not the few years the player is playing.  The skill curves don't matter because the skills will naturally migrate from where they are abundant to where they are scarce, since you are more valuable as the only master smith in a place than as one master smith among a hundred.

     Yeah--realistically, one would expect the fort to "behave" economically as a village for the first several years, producing mostly foodstuffs to stay alive, and then take decades to mature into a more well-rounded fort, until it's finally a city, exporting quality finished goods to the less developed hillfolk. But DF's unrealism completely subverts this standard behavior, first by your fort importing a lot of food & raw materials in its early years (as most of your dudes are busy mining, and it might easily take you a long time to get a good farm running), and second by exporting finished goods right away (it's ridiculously easy to get useful Legendaries in the first year, especially if you savescum migrant waves and/or get a mood or two--which of course drives your wealth up even faster).
     Technically, skilled artisans don't move to where they are scarce so much as they move to where they are desired. A master smith stuck out in the ass-end of nowhere might encounter no more demand than making a few knives in a year (and being forced to undercharge drastically for them, as that's all her customers can pay), and repairing the odd metal pot or shovel. Sure, as long as she has access to the metal she can always make goods for export, but she could do that just as easily in a sizable town, or especially a city, where she'd have much better access to the clients with the heaviest purses . . . or, in DF terms, the clients with the greatest need to outfit militia squads.

1. [Peasants'] farming skills enable them to have a decent enough life where they are--relocation is not justified,
2. Their primary skills--farming would be next to useless in a city, and
3. Their secondary skills--various flavors of crafting and its preliminary steps--would not enable them to find a better life in the city.
4. Those dwarves whose non-agricultural skills WERE good enough had a strong motivation to move away.

The fortresses *are* farms already, which means there is no reason for a farming dwarf to move out to the hillocks, for reasons already discussed there is no reason for a crafting dwarf to move to the fortress from the hillocks and therefore there is no reason for hillocks not to be 'factories' as it were.  This means the only economic difference between the two would basically be the architecture.

     Admittedly, DF fortresses are indeed farms . . . for game-convenience issues, they pretty much have to be. But real-life behavior is that cities have to import the vast majority of their food. And why should the architecture not be significant?
Hillocks: Low rent, fresh air (irrelevant to a dwarf), much fewer useless nobles.
Fortress: Security from invaders & wild animals, much better access to full medical care, more temples & art, much further underground.
Overall, I think a dwarf of economic ability, free to choose his place in the world, would much prefer a fortress.

[Sarmatian123]

In Dwarf Mode we are not setting up farming villages, but building on each embark the ultimate fortress, which may or may not win contest to become the glorious Mountainhome. Let's keep that in mind okay?

Now, that doesn't mean at first stage of such embark we wouldn't need to kick start a farming village first. It is matter of survival. With time and more Dwarves arriving, we add mining and start tools-weapons-armor metal industry. Also cloth industry if we chose to, but it should be more an optional industry. Pottery industry seems currently as double for glass industry and it performs poorly too, so everyone skips it. Then glass industry, as Dwarves alike all creatures of comfort look for finer things in their life too. Just right sand is not available everywhere.

Also we create embark on 8x8 grid. Usually it takes 1x1 or 2x2, but I like going with 3x3 sometimes as well. So it leaves plenty of grids empty of this embark. Empty grids could support a location. Hard coded or custom made, but usable by AI as well. Location created from your embark and worked by up to 10 Dwarves, you need to equip, train and deploy there to work it. This way we could get more ores and adamantine in as direct loot for your embark. Food, silk thread, cheese, logs and such basic products.

Furthermore to stick an "it is an economy!" bumper-sticker on it all... Lets fix the taxation system first. Lets all embarks pay feudal dues to Mountainhome. This is root for all economic systems. It has to be fixed into game first. Mountain home will need to form some appropriate 100% professional military Dwarf squads though, to maintain this position. It would help longevity of ingame Mountainhomes. Now they die like flies. I played adventure mode just once and it seemed to me Dwarves were just another wild cave dwellers then actually fortress builders and industry magnates and that wasn't even a village, but a Mountainhome.

[GoblinCookie]

     Setting the market town as a middleman between the villages/hillocks and the cities/fortresses? Very well, though I don't know what's to be gained by that step (in DF terms). I suppose it might agree with the default caravan's "a little of everything" inventory; the way how, in the absence of a trade agreement, caravans are a mix of raw materials & finished goods, not markedly suggestive of having just come from the city OR the country.

No, the market town is not the middleman; the market town is the bottom.  The peasant villages do not feature into the thing as economic units at all, instead the thing is a single circle with everyone contributing to the central market/stockpile (shops are stockpiles remember) in the same manner, the only economic difference between the townsmen and the peasant villagers is that the latter have to travel far less distance to get to the market.  The fact that both seek to travel the lowest amount of distance in order to get to the market means that those who can will end up in the market town, it is not that the craftsmen live in the market town because it is better specifically for craftsmen, it is that the peasant can't live in the market town because their fields are too far away. 

The proposal is that we get rid of hillocks (and other villages) as sites and demote them to off-site location/structures of a particular proper site.  In most starting scenarios the player does not start off as an actual site, but as an off-site location of an existing AI settlement.  In effect the site gives them a load of capital and a bunch of dwarves with the suitable location, demanding that they send back goods to the main site which set them up.  Once the debt is paid off the off-site structure the player runs can 'declare independence' from the main site (or not) becoming a regular fortress following standard rules, but in doing so they forfeit support from their parent site.  However because you just deprived the parent site of their structure, you just created an economic gap for yourself to fill; this is why the player would choose to play a starting scenario structure as if they just start a regular structure from the ground up you will have to find out what specifically is in demand. 

In fortress mode what this means is that hillock dwarves do not trade with us *as* hillocks.  What they instead to is travel to our fortress to get whatever goods they need and bring to us the goods they produce.  This is where the utility of shops comes in, shops increase the efficiency of the process, since instead of the individual hill dwarves traveling to our fortress whenever *they* need something, we can instead send all the goods they need to a shop we built in the hillocks; this means they spend less time commuting and more time working. 

     Yeah--realistically, one would expect the fort to "behave" economically as a village for the first several years, producing mostly foodstuffs to stay alive, and then take decades to mature into a more well-rounded fort, until it's finally a city, exporting quality finished goods to the less developed hillfolk. But DF's unrealism completely subverts this standard behavior, first by your fort importing a lot of food & raw materials in its early years (as most of your dudes are busy mining, and it might easily take you a long time to get a good farm running), and second by exporting finished goods right away (it's ridiculously easy to get useful Legendaries in the first year, especially if you savescum migrant waves and/or get a mood or two--which of course drives your wealth up even faster).
     Technically, skilled artisans don't move to where they are scarce so much as they move to where they are desired. A master smith stuck out in the ass-end of nowhere might encounter no more demand than making a few knives in a year (and being forced to undercharge drastically for them, as that's all her customers can pay), and repairing the odd metal pot or shovel. Sure, as long as she has access to the metal she can always make goods for export, but she could do that just as easily in a sizable town, or especially a city, where she'd have much better access to the clients with the heaviest purses . . . or, in DF terms, the clients with the greatest need to outfit militia squads.

If everyone is going to be developing all the industries then of course their skills are going to desired. 

     Admittedly, DF fortresses are indeed farms . . . for game-convenience issues, they pretty much have to be. But real-life behavior is that cities have to import the vast majority of their food. And why should the architecture not be significant?
Hillocks: Low rent, fresh air (irrelevant to a dwarf), much fewer useless nobles.
Fortress: Security from invaders & wild animals, much better access to full medical care, more temples & art, much further underground.
Overall, I think a dwarf of economic ability, free to choose his place in the world, would much prefer a fortress.

Realism is contextual.  The point I have been making is that if the world economy were organized as the DF one present is, then huge cities importing the vast majority of their food would not happen. At the moment such cities are created by fiat, a specific mechanic conjures them out of nowhere and there nothing 'natural' or 'realistic' about their emergence.  It is more or less deceptive even, we are supposed to have vast cities so they game makes them up, but actually what we have depicted is a world where they realistically would not exist.

[Anandar]

Having read trough a whole load of crap among other things and some good points... DF in fortress mode runs like a tribe or a communistic society... everything is for the good/benefit of the dwarves of the fort as a whole... for economy and trade to exist in a way that would work well on a global scale forts would need to have a much smaller range of resources be it ore, types of wood or foodstuffs available meaning trading what we do have for what we dont have to increase our variety, and the items we do have in bigger quantities so we can send them away in any and every form we think are suitable for others, a small village will create their own basic needs cups clothes blankets etc while sharing skills or food from their farms, but to get important things like plows or paper if a village needed it, or even weapons for town guard they send excess food or items that are unique to their area (wild plants for medicines for example) if an area is exceptionally fertile in production or is capable of producing other valuable materials... stone, ore, or is a good spot for defence of ones province, a small village will grow to be a town which will be in some ways more self sufficient,
 if DF was to create wealth for each individual dwarf there would be the ability to create trade between dwarves, urist mcminers mine for ore, as requested by urist mcsmithy to make replacement tools as wear and tear would be needed, excess ore is used to make other tools eg axe for cutting trees which is used to make beds or chests taht urist mcwoodcutter / mcarpenter work together to create and these items pass back along as a trade for services or products tendered, and similar to how artifact rumours work, dwarves could hear about food or materials from other places they want to work with or even clothing/jewelry and this leads to trading base resources or finished goods to other forts towns or what have you...
E.g, site a has large amounts of iron and some light foliage and makes tools site b has red wood forest and very little in the way of minerals so they make all sorts of furiture out of redwood, considered exotic in site a, ship it to site a for tools hear about site a havig sandstone and request some shipped back in exchange for native wildlife found in forest creating a tradeable economy between the 2, site c would hear about these and offer maybe food unique to the area or perhaps they are suited as a defense of both sites a and b due to strategic positioning and offer payment by supplying combat training and protection for food and armour etc...
and on a site based level, bringing resources that were unavailable to urist mccrafter before will allow them to create new and exciting things to trade to other urists for insert need or want here... and economic growth so to speak would rely on finding more sites for unique items keeping a high diversity rather than relying too heavily on aparticular spot and flooding the maket and devaluing all properties due to commonality of the items in ones possesion, meaning not every urist would want to have the exact same bed made from same materials otherwise they would devalue their own belongings besides DF already creates unique desires and likes with in each dwarf...

[GoblinCookie]

Having read trough a whole load of crap among other things and some good points... DF in fortress mode runs like a tribe or a communistic society... everything is for the good/benefit of the dwarves of the fort as a whole... for economy and trade to exist in a way that would work well on a global scale forts would need to have a much smaller range of resources be it ore, types of wood or foodstuffs available meaning trading what we do have for what we dont have to increase our variety, and the items we do have in bigger quantities so we can send them away in any and every form we think are suitable for others, a small village will create their own basic needs cups clothes blankets etc while sharing skills or food from their farms, but to get important things like plows or paper if a village needed it, or even weapons for town guard they send excess food or items that are unique to their area (wild plants for medicines for example) if an area is exceptionally fertile in production or is capable of producing other valuable materials... stone, ore, or is a good spot for defence of ones province, a small village will grow to be a town which will be in some ways more self sufficient,
 if DF was to create wealth for each individual dwarf there would be the ability to create trade between dwarves, urist mcminers mine for ore, as requested by urist mcsmithy to make replacement tools as wear and tear would be needed, excess ore is used to make other tools eg axe for cutting trees which is used to make beds or chests taht urist mcwoodcutter / mcarpenter work together to create and these items pass back along as a trade for services or products tendered, and similar to how artifact rumours work, dwarves could hear about food or materials from other places they want to work with or even clothing/jewelry and this leads to trading base resources or finished goods to other forts towns or what have you...
E.g, site a has large amounts of iron and some light foliage and makes tools site b has red wood forest and very little in the way of minerals so they make all sorts of furiture out of redwood, considered exotic in site a, ship it to site a for tools hear about site a havig sandstone and request some shipped back in exchange for native wildlife found in forest creating a tradeable economy between the 2, site c would hear about these and offer maybe food unique to the area or perhaps they are suited as a defense of both sites a and b due to strategic positioning and offer payment by supplying combat training and protection for food and armour etc...
and on a site based level, bringing resources that were unavailable to urist mccrafter before will allow them to create new and exciting things to trade to other urists for insert need or want here... and economic growth so to speak would rely on finding more sites for unique items keeping a high diversity rather than relying too heavily on aparticular spot and flooding the maket and devaluing all properties due to commonality of the items in ones possesion, meaning not every urist would want to have the exact same bed made from same materials otherwise they would devalue their own belongings besides DF already creates unique desires and likes with in each dwarf...

The problem with modelling dwarves individually is that it is very heavy on the FPS, but it is rather pointless to have all those individual likes and dislikes without taking them into account.  Thing is though that in RL likes and dislikes tend not to be individual, lots of people tend to want the same thing at the same time in an apparently non-random fashion.  What we could do is rather than determining demands randomly split every civilizations population into say 100 'market research' categories, all the individuals of which have the same desires.  By splitting the population up into such groups we can go to model demands beyond mere subsistence (we have 100 dwarves hence we need 100 beds) and instead we can bundle all the demands of the categories that the dwarves in an AI site belong to together so that if 8 of them belong to a category that likes mahogany and another 8 of them belong to a category which like pines sp once all subsistence needs are we will generate an 'order' for 8 pine and 8 mahogany beds.  If they cannot get mahogany, this unmet demand turns into a demand for traders to bring 8 mahogany, which if not met will ultimately result in a site creating a logging camp in a mahogany wood to send back enough mahogany.

Long ago I had the idea of having the economy work so that initially the sites try to meet their substance needs, then their basically individual preference needs and then they try to horde money.  They will trade money for individual preferences and then individual preferences for subsistence if they have to.  This is how money would work, it is the least preference good which will traded for any other good that is in demand because it is at the top of the list. 

[Anandar]

DF is not affected by peer pressure, trends, human nature, or subliminal messaging etc, IRL people believe what they hear and see on tv or from leaders of social/religious groups, governments, or even strong charismatic people (like cult leaders)... or even like sheep they follow because someone is bold enough to stand out from a crowd, we as humans are also prone to follow through watching our parents and surrounding environment which influence our likes and dislikes, dwarves are not humans so they would not necessarily be influenced the way humans are to everything besides you dont need to fill every favourite thing to make the dwarf happy if they have an exceptional or masterwork bed they would still get happy thoughts and since every dwarf likes a range of different things from animals to jewels to colours there is pleanty of room to make them happy from 1 or 2 things that orther dwarves have similar tastes for.... reducing the need to get...
eg urist mcmahogany likes cats for their fur, mahogany for its texture, and persimmons for their acidity, urist mcgemcraft likes citrine for for its solidarity, spider silk for its softness, oak for its bark and persimmons for their colour...  so 2 dwarves with 1 persimmon and if a meal is made well they both get happier, even if they both have a bed made fro cherry tree wood... and with time why not allow a dwarf to change tastes in things,

What we could do is rather than determining demands randomly split every civilizations population into say 100 'market research' categories, all the individuals of which have the same desires.  By splitting the population up into such groups we can go to model demands beyond mere subsistence (we have 100 dwarves hence we need 100 beds) and instead we can bundle all the demands of the categories that the dwarves in an AI site belong to together so that if 8 of them belong to a category that likes mahogany and another 8 of them belong to a category which like pines sp once all subsistence needs are we will generate an 'order' for 8 pine and 8 mahogany beds.  If they cannot get mahogany, this unmet demand turns into a demand for traders to bring 8 mahogany, which if not met will ultimately result in a site creating a logging camp in a mahogany wood to send back enough mahogany.

Long ago I had the idea of having the economy work so that initially the sites try to meet their substance needs, then their basically individual preference needs and then they try to horde money.  They will trade money for individual preferences and then individual preferences for subsistence if they have to.  This is how money would work, it is the least preference good which will traded for any other good that is in demand because it is at the top of the list. 

I like the sound of both of these myself as potential ways to incorporate economy and trade into DF questions regarding the use of money though... would sites create money based off their base civ/mountain home? And if a site goes independent and creates its own currency whats to say other towns or civilizations wont accept or recognize said currency or that the value of it would be too low and the material its made from is more valuable than the money itself? (Australia got rid of 1 and 2 cent pieces as the metal more valable than the cent value they represented for example)