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[JonarTheDabber]

The main issues with the economic system in Dwarf Fortress back in 2014 was that coins were constantly be hauled around and that Dwarves couldn't afford anything because they didn't have the money. My idea is that instead of Dwarves using money, it could be more like actual Feudalism where people are paid with land. The way this would work in Dwarf Fortress is that you'd designate a little area that meets some requirements based on the Dwarf's profession (so a farmer might get a tiny little plot of land while a soldier will get a lot of land). The dwarf that owns this bit of land would do whatever he/she wants with it, like building a little bedroom or growing some crops. Dwarves would also fill their land with things they like so players won't have to read through every dwarf's description and give them the things they like through annoying micro management (actually, having coins in this specific situation might actually make sense because of course peasants shouldn't be able to just get golden furniture). You wouldn't necessarily have to give dwarves sufficient land or any land at all, but as a result riots would happen which would create lots of !!FUN!!.

What do you think about this idea? I can already see some flaws with it, mainly that I'm not sure if there'd be enough for the player to do anymore. Perhaps the dwarves wouldn't make all of their decisions on their own but instead the player could still guide those decisions somehow.

[PlumpHelmetMan]

The economy arc is still quite a ways off, but this is an idea for sure.

[GoblinCookie]

The main issues with the economic system in Dwarf Fortress back in 2014 was that coins were constantly be hauled around and that Dwarves couldn't afford anything because they didn't have the money. My idea is that instead of Dwarves using money, it could be more like actual Feudalism where people are paid with land. The way this would work in Dwarf Fortress is that you'd designate a little area that meets some requirements based on the Dwarf's profession (so a farmer might get a tiny little plot of land while a soldier will get a lot of land). The dwarf that owns this bit of land would do whatever he/she wants with it, like building a little bedroom or growing some crops. Dwarves would also fill their land with things they like so players won't have to read through every dwarf's description and give them the things they like through annoying micro management (actually, having coins in this specific situation might actually make sense because of course peasants shouldn't be able to just get golden furniture). You wouldn't necessarily have to give dwarves sufficient land or any land at all, but as a result riots would happen which would create lots of !!FUN!!.

What do you think about this idea? I can already see some flaws with it, mainly that I'm not sure if there'd be enough for the player to do anymore. Perhaps the dwarves wouldn't make all of their decisions on their own but instead the player could still guide those decisions somehow.

Expending masses of labour moving coins around is quite realistic, in real-life that is called banking.   

The feudal setup does not work for dwarves given their basic lifestyle.  The fortress to be functional is indivisible, we cannot have too much autonomous initiative digging stuff or else the diggers will end up bringing the whole thing crashing down.  That added to a whole load of absent mechanics to do with smoke, air, structural integrity and sewage which makes the situation even more true that it presently is. 

There is a lot of misconceptions about feudalism here.  People in Feudalism are not paid in land, they aren't paid much at all.  They grow or make their own stuff, consume some of it, give some of it to those above them and sell the rest.  The game could benefit from more autonomy in for instance furnishing bedrooms, so our dwarves could furnish their own rooms to cut down on micromanagement; basically it could deal with less micromanagement of trivial matters in general. 

The whole idea of giving peasants land is that the peasants then develop the land NOT the lords developing the land and giving it to the peasants.  The lords give some patch of wilderness to the peasants who then turn it into a farm and pay rent/taxes to the lord (not separate things in feudalism).  The exact arrangements vary wildly as does the degree that the peasantry can be compared to slaves but this is always the case.

In Dwarf Feudalism what we would be doing is the exact opposite however by necessity.  The Lord/Fortress goes through the hard work of carving out whatever they are giving the peasants, making sure that it all fits together harmoniously with everything else and then they give it to the peasants to exploit part of it's value all the way prohibiting them to further develop their property because of the total mayhem that unplanned digging and production would create in the potential deathtrap in which they live.  The point of Feudalism is that the peasants produce value for their lords on top of what they are given why the lords concern themselves with ruling, fighting and lazying about. 

To actually run a feudal system in which the peasants add no value to the land they are given on top of what the lords themselves have already created is madness.

[Schmaven]

Paying all dwarves in land reminds me a bit of the current noble system, where position holders seek various kinds of designated rooms to be assigned to them, along with some value of items to go inside them too.  Are you proposing something akin to this, but without the room designations - just blank plots?

[Shonai_Dweller]

Paying all dwarves in land reminds me a bit of the current noble system, where position holders seek various kinds of designated rooms to be assigned to them, along with some value of items to go inside them too.  Are you proposing something akin to this, but without the room designations - just blank plots?

Surely the granting of land and what happens in a single fortress is unrelated. They get land and build a fortress there, right? It all belongs to the noble.

[GoblinCookie]

Paying all dwarves in land reminds me a bit of the current noble system, where position holders seek various kinds of designated rooms to be assigned to them, along with some value of items to go inside them too.  Are you proposing something akin to this, but without the room designations - just blank plots?

Ultimately being able to give space to dwarves for a purpose and be able to have them figure out how to install all the needed equipment is something that would be room for micromanagement purposes for rooms and stuff. 

Paying all dwarves in land reminds me a bit of the current noble system, where position holders seek various kinds of designated rooms to be assigned to them, along with some value of items to go inside them too.  Are you proposing something akin to this, but without the room designations - just blank plots?

Surely the granting of land and what happens in a single fortress is unrelated. They get land and build a fortress there, right? It all belongs to the noble.

Who builds the fortress?  Presumably not the noble all on their own? 

[Five chickens]

Do prices change at all based on supply and demand?  Maybe they should.  For example, if you keep cranking out stone crafts, eventually the prices should drop because you’re flooding the market.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Do prices change at all based on supply and demand?  Maybe they should.  For example, if you keep cranking out stone crafts, eventually the prices should drop because you’re flooding the market.

There's no economy right now, so no.
When the world economy is switched on, I'd assume this to be the first thing which happens. And by the time that happens, I'd assume enough changes in the game will have taken place to ensure that player sites won't be able to keep pumping out crafts at the rate they currently do (or that all sites will be doing so making them worthless besides a couple of masterpieces and rediscovered antiques).

[Five chickens]

Here's another thing: I think you should be able to place bids on items you want, to encourage caravans to deliver more of those items to your fort.

For example, say you're low on soap.  Maybe you could offer to purchase X number of soap bars at Y price, should those bars be delivered.  Also steel bars, plump helmet spawn... etc.  Then if a caravan brought those items, the transaction would automatically be tallied before any other trading could be done (and you would pay your promised price for the number of items you bid on, NOT the price the caravan would ordinarily charge).  One drawback of doing this might be that these traders would know they can squeeze you when it comes to these items.  But the benefit would be that it would be easier to get what you need when you need it.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Here's another thing: I think you should be able to place bids on items you want, to encourage caravans to deliver more of those items to your fort.

For example, say you're low on soap.  Maybe you could offer to purchase X number of soap bars at Y price, should those bars be delivered.  Also steel bars, plump helmet spawn... etc.  Then if a caravan brought those items, the transaction would automatically be tallied before any other trading could be done (and you would pay your promised price for the number of items you bid on, NOT the price the caravan would ordinarily charge).  One drawback of doing this might be that these traders would know they can squeeze you when it comes to these items.  But the benefit would be that it would be easier to get what you need when you need it.

Isn't that how it works right now? You state what you need more of and they bring lots of it at an inflated price.
Not sure adding a required purchase to that is realistic or fun.
Someone will surely point me in the direction of historical realism in medieval trade practices if I'm wrong though.

[Five chickens]

In my current fortress, I haven't been able to set trade priorities since they started offering to make my fort a part of the realm.  And I don't think you can ever do that with other civilizations.

[Shonai_Dweller]

In my current fortress, I haven't been able to set trade priorities since they started offering to make my fort a part of the realm.  And I don't think you can ever do that with other civilizations.

Yes, part of the trade off of refusing a barony and "maintaining distance", you never get to set trade priorities.

[SixOfSpades]

IIRC, you also lose the ability to set trade priorities once you become the Mountainhome.

Realistically, your fort shipping in a ton of raw materials from the capital, in exchange for a small pile of cheap mugs & stone crafts is the LAST thing that should happen, it should be the other way around. If you're just a colony starting out, the majority of your citizens should be focused on the essential things like farming, mining, & defense--they don't have time to sit around making -orthoclase figurine-s, which the Mountainhome wouldn't want to buy anyway because their Stonecrafters are already way better than yours. What the capital does want to buy from you is your raw & luxury materials like gold & steel bars, unshaped marble, rough gems, tanned hides, and lots & lots of relatively nonperishable food.

Put bluntly, we're almost certainly not going to be seeing anything like a realistic Economy until we've also got a realistic Agriculture system, wherein vast fields of farms, stacked several layers deep, will be required to support any kind of large population.

[Shonai_Dweller]

IIRC, you also lose the ability to set trade priorities once you become the Mountainhome.

Realistically, your fort shipping in a ton of raw materials from the capital, in exchange for a small pile of cheap mugs & stone crafts is the LAST thing that should happen, it should be the other way around. If you're just a colony starting out, the majority of your citizens should be focused on the essential things like farming, mining, & defense--they don't have time to sit around making -orthoclase figurine-s, which the Mountainhome wouldn't want to buy anyway because their Stonecrafters are already way better than yours. What the capital does want to buy from you is your raw & luxury materials like gold & steel bars, unshaped marble, rough gems, tanned hides, and lots & lots of relatively nonperishable food.

Put bluntly, we're almost certainly not going to be seeing anything like a realistic Economy until we've also got a realistic Agriculture system, wherein vast fields of farms, stacked several layers deep, will be required to support any kind of large population.

Yup, which is why Economy isn't planned until after the politics and society Starting Scenarios arc when player sites will actually have a purpose and relationship with other sites.

[GoblinCookie]

IIRC, you also lose the ability to set trade priorities once you become the Mountainhome.

Realistically, your fort shipping in a ton of raw materials from the capital, in exchange for a small pile of cheap mugs & stone crafts is the LAST thing that should happen, it should be the other way around. If you're just a colony starting out, the majority of your citizens should be focused on the essential things like farming, mining, & defense--they don't have time to sit around making -orthoclase figurine-s, which the Mountainhome wouldn't want to buy anyway because their Stonecrafters are already way better than yours. What the capital does want to buy from you is your raw & luxury materials like gold & steel bars, unshaped marble, rough gems, tanned hides, and lots & lots of relatively nonperishable food.

Put bluntly, we're almost certainly not going to be seeing anything like a realistic Economy until we've also got a realistic Agriculture system, wherein vast fields of farms, stacked several layers deep, will be required to support any kind of large population.

Yup, which is why Economy isn't planned until after the politics and society Starting Scenarios arc when player sites will actually have a purpose and relationship with other sites.

I do not think SixOfSpades was talking about politics there, he was talking about agriculture. 

Agriculture is presently not overly productive but rather the dwarves eat too little food.  The economy will always be messed up unless we fixed the food situation, however much work on politics we do.  At present there is no basis for the basic relationship between the hillocks/mountain halls and the fortress because the fortress can effortlessly produce enough food to feed itself without needing any external supply of food.  The most realistic situation is to up the amount of food eaten by every individual, since the actual production of food per area is actually probably less than it would be in reality not more. 

Due to the food situation what we currently have in fortress mode is ultimately a post-scarcity economy, everything is actually realistically worth effectively nothing since every major economic actor that has been around for more than a blink of an eye can produce endless amount of stuff, not because the amount they produce is particularly large for the time they are using up but because they eat so little that they can employ everyone to produce a massive glut of whatever items they wish. 

The fundamental conceit of the game is that seven dwarves can simply turn up in a wilderness area and create a dwarf fortress.  The reality is they cannot, because they do not produce enough surplus value (wealth on top of their own needs) to move the development of the fortress forward at anything but the most slow pace.  It takes a far larger group of people, or a large amount of external investment of surplus value in order to free said dwarves from spending decades as a camp of basically hunter-gatherers, which while perfectly viable for their survival is not really what Tolkien envisioned a dwarf fortress as being.   

A lot of it is down to population, the larger the population the more surplus value you have and it is surplus value that builds a fortress not the dwarves simply existing.  What allows seven dwarves to build a fortress, also means that we have 200 dwarves we have insane amounts of surplus value, since for the seven to be free to build the fortress they have to have a very high ratio of surplus value (wealth produced against wealth consumed) but once we have a large population we are swimming in surplus value for that very reason.