Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[thompson]

You don't think the starting scenario arc should come before the economy arc?

[SixOfSpades]

Agriculture is presently not overly productive but rather the dwarves eat too little food.

It's both, actually, though admittedly the latter problem is far more egregious than the former. For a single tile (approximately 1 square meter) of strawberry plants to be able to produce enough strawberries to count as five separate meals, and to do that EVERY SEASON, year after year, with zero fertilizer (or maintenance like weeding, watering, & pest control), is very much at odds with how crops actually work. The average real-world field grows only one harvest per year--two in a pinch. But yes, the much bigger irregularity is dwarves only eating 1 meal per month.

. . . what we currently have in fortress mode is ultimately a post-scarcity economy . . .

Another reason for which is the glut of base reagents, as well. Your fort will never run out of stone, gemstones are abundant, plants (and therefore booze) are literally dirt cheap, magma & goblinite are functionally infinite, as are sand & clay (if you have them at all), and the meat industry's supply almost always exceeds demand. Pretty much the only things that can be rare are ores, flux stone, & wood. Ironically, one of the few sources of scarcity is the trading caravan itself, as even if you set your desire for a certain good to the very highest priority, the caravan will still only bring 4 of it.

What allows seven dwarves to build a fortress, also means that [when] we have 200 dwarves we have insane amounts of surplus value . . .

And to counteract that (since this is the Suggestions forum, after all):
1. The more basic, essential labors (Grower, Miner, Woodcutter, etc.) should be quick & easy to learn--dwarves can get to Adequate almost immediately--but incur rapidly diminishing returns with increased practice: A Legendary should be hardly any faster or more productive than a Skilled. This will reduce problems like an entire 200-dwarf fort being fed solely by the labors of just two Legendary Planters. Instead, the fort will require a much broader agricultural base, with dozens of farmers working--and, since there's no point in getting much better at farming, it will be more efficient for the farmers (and the Overseer) for each Grower to also have an alternate trade to ply in their spare time. Very realistic.
2. On the other hand, the more elite, specialist labors (Gem Setter, Surgeon, Glassmaker, etc.) should be far more time-consuming & difficult to learn--to the point that until a dwarf becomes at least Proficient, he is basically nothing more than a student of the art, his labors don't even come close to turning what could be called a "profit". (Hence, these are the labors that would benefit the most from apprenticeship.) In return, advancing to higher skill levels in these labors would produce noticeably better quality / higher success rates. So to maximize gain, it will be in dwarves'/the Overseer's best interests to have only 1 or 2 dwarves in their entire fort practicing such trades.
3. In general, experience level in a given labor should have very little effect on the time required to perform that labor. It doesn't matter how Legendary that Miller is, he's still gonna need to turn that quern hundreds of times to grind that wheat into flour, just like his Dabbling counterpart. The Dabbler is just going to not know just how fine to grind it, and have his arms get tired sooner.

Admittedly, even with all those changes, that's still not an economy. But at least it's division of labor, which is a start.

[Bumber]

For a single tile (approximately 1 square meter) of strawberry plants to be able to produce enough strawberries to count as five separate meals, [...]

That might be literally 5 strawberries, though.

[Five chickens]

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.

This makes a lot of sense.  Early on, agriculture should probably be onerous enough to require at least half of your dwarves to focus on farming.  And finding a comparative advantage when it comes to crafting should take a while.

Many excellent points here.

[SixOfSpades]

For a single tile (approximately 1 square meter) of strawberry plants to be able to produce enough strawberries to count as five separate meals, [...]

That might be literally 5 strawberries, though.

Urist: Hey, I'm gonna make some dinner. Have you eaten?
Kadol: Well, a couple of weeks ago, I ate a strawberry.
Urist: Oh, so you're still full, then.
Kadol: Yeah, I'm completely stuffed, thanks.

[Azerty]

3. In general, experience level in a given labor should have very little effect on the time required to perform that labor. It doesn't matter how Legendary that Miller is, he's still gonna need to turn that quern hundreds of times to grind that wheat into flour, just like his Dabbling counterpart. The Dabbler is just going to not know just how fine to grind it, and have his arms get tired sooner.

So, in your scenario, a Legendary Miller might work longer than a Dabbling one?

Admittedly, even with all those changes, that's still not an economy. But at least it's division of labor, which is a start.

Moreover, it will make a majority of the population work in the fields, which was the situation before the Agricultural Revolution of the 1780s.

[thompson]

I'd be interested in hearing Toady's view on how the economy should ultimately be balanced. Too productive and the economy is post-scarcity and uninteresting. Too realistic and the game becomes a drudge. Would player forts have some advantage, such as higher productivity or faster skill progression? If not, how do you make the fort relevant at all without being swamped by cheaper, high quality imports? Does working your way up from humble primary industries become the standard way to play? I'm not opposed to that, mind you, it would be pretty cool. But at some point a decision will need to be made and that will have significant ramifications.

I'm keen on seeing how the starting scenarios arc plays out. Getting that right will be essential for the economy to make any sense.

[GoblinCookie]

You don't think the starting scenario arc should come before the economy arc?

I don't think there should be an economy arc as such.  It is quite a mistake to treat the economy separately from the other arcs, the economy is in effect the master arc for everything else and treating it as thought it were equal to the other arcs is not a good idea.

But if we *do* have to have an economy arc it is a bad idea to introduce it separately from the starting scenarios.  That is because without an economy the devs will not be able to balance the starting scenarios to the economy when it is introduced, creating a whole load of extra work as the economy breaks the whole starting scenario system and vica versa.

Another reason for which is the glut of base reagents, as well. Your fort will never run out of stone, gemstones are abundant, plants (and therefore booze) are literally dirt cheap, magma & goblinite are functionally infinite, as are sand & clay (if you have them at all), and the meat industry's supply almost always exceeds demand. Pretty much the only things that can be rare are ores, flux stone, & wood. Ironically, one of the few sources of scarcity is the trading caravan itself, as even if you set your desire for a certain good to the very highest priority, the caravan will still only bring 4 of it.

That is (in all but the most unusual worlds) quite realistic.  The largest worlds are I have heard it said the size of Ireland but Ireland has a population of nearly 5 million.  No dwarf fortress large world has a population of more than a few 100k and this will not change because the memory limitations of the game do not allow a realistic population to exist and the economy will only increase the memory requirements of populations obviously. 

Historically the world is in a situation where the resources are super-abundant but the labour needed to exploit the resources is scarce.  Nowadays we are in a situation where labour is super-abundant but resources are scarce, because the population has grown considerably and the ending of the scarcity of labour allowed the demands of the individuals to increase as well. 

And to counteract that (since this is the Suggestions forum, after all):
1. The more basic, essential labors (Grower, Miner, Woodcutter, etc.) should be quick & easy to learn--dwarves can get to Adequate almost immediately--but incur rapidly diminishing returns with increased practice: A Legendary should be hardly any faster or more productive than a Skilled. This will reduce problems like an entire 200-dwarf fort being fed solely by the labors of just two Legendary Planters. Instead, the fort will require a much broader agricultural base, with dozens of farmers working--and, since there's no point in getting much better at farming, it will be more efficient for the farmers (and the Overseer) for each Grower to also have an alternate trade to ply in their spare time. Very realistic.
2. On the other hand, the more elite, specialist labors (Gem Setter, Surgeon, Glassmaker, etc.) should be far more time-consuming & difficult to learn--to the point that until a dwarf becomes at least Proficient, he is basically nothing more than a student of the art, his labors don't even come close to turning what could be called a "profit". (Hence, these are the labors that would benefit the most from apprenticeship.) In return, advancing to higher skill levels in these labors would produce noticeably better quality / higher success rates. So to maximize gain, it will be in dwarves'/the Overseer's best interests to have only 1 or 2 dwarves in their entire fort practicing such trades.
3. In general, experience level in a given labor should have very little effect on the time required to perform that labor. It doesn't matter how Legendary that Miller is, he's still gonna need to turn that quern hundreds of times to grind that wheat into flour, just like his Dabbling counterpart. The Dabbler is just going to not know just how fine to grind it, and have his arms get tired sooner.

Admittedly, even with all those changes, that's still not an economy. But at least it's division of labor, which is a start.

In a lot of contexts, time is the only advantage to skill there is.  Time spent making items is negligible at the moment, it is all about hauling and hauling is why the whole different time-scale in fortress mode is a bad idea for the economy.  It will not make much difference how much time is spent making the items when the labour cost is really the hauling of the items and their ingrediants. 

The division of labour does not make always sense in the game for the kind of skills that historically were specialist.  Carpenters and masons were historically specialist, but the sheer furniture demand for the endless immigrant waves means that it is a better idea to mobilise the whole population to make furniture rather than having a few specialist carpenters/masons.  Division of labour only presently makes sense when demand for the item is low and/or the materials needed are scarce.

Given the caravan always accepts items in almost any quantity, the 'demand' is despite the noted lack of demand from actual dwarves effectively limitless.  This pretty much limits the utility of the division of labour to in effect those making thing materials imported *from* the caravan and absent on the map. 

[SixOfSpades]

So, in your scenario, a Legendary Miller might work longer than a Dabbling one?

Sorry if I was unclear. No, the Legendary will still be able to do the job faster/better than a Proficient, just not noticeably so, and certainly not with enough gain in speed and/or quality to justify the time & effort of his working all the way up to Legendary. A lowly Dabbler, meanwhile, is going to waste time making mistakes the first few attempts (possibly even ruining a bag of grain or two), but getting the hang of it soon enough.

Moreover, it will make a majority of the population work in the fields, which was the situation before the Agricultural Revolution of the 1780s.

Precisely. Of course, I'm not trying to force people to play their game in a certain way, but it just feels wrong for such a (generally) realistic game to do a major disservice to what's been all of humanity's predominant occupation ever since the dawn of civilization. I'm all for procedurally generated cultural differences between one civ & the next, but honestly there doesn't seem to be much room for variance here. Besides, it's difficult to take pride in your supposedly "productive, successful" fortress when every time you scroll through the Units list, 2/3^rds of them are No Job or doing leisure activities.

[Bumber]

It would be great if we could have trade agreements that let us automatically buy a bunch of food from other sites. That way we wouldn't need to devote the space and labor ourselves.

[thompson]

It would be great if we could have trade agreements that let us automatically buy a bunch of food from other sites. That way we wouldn't need to devote the space and labor ourselves.

*Sigh* This has been on my wish list for a while now. Not just food, anything really. Once the FPS drops too much babysitting the game becomes impossible so anything that lets us set things to function without intervention would be great.

Regarding the economy, I can certainly understand GC's view about development of the economy being a core priority. I'd imagine the reason it isn't would be due to the difficulty of balancing something that is dynamic by it's very nature. The way items are represented in game doesn't help matters with varying quality and materials, but there are ways around that. Toady seems to want to prioritize new gameplay for the upcoming releases (magic, starting scenarios), and not having an economy certainly would make those releases easier. Whether that's the optimal strategy is another question of course, but given that he has tried implementing an economy before I'd imagine he's likely already thinking about what needs to change to get those economic interactions working. The code for villian networks could be used as the basis for companies or other organizations, and the society arc would govern how groups interact at a site/civ level. The economy arc may never really happen as a discrete development cycle but rather slowly get built up in the background until one day Toady turns his attention to market dynamics and finance. I could easily see that being folded into the starting scenarios arc. But that's depend on how much the underlying code base needs to change to make that happen. I really have no idea about that.

[therahedwig]

As far as I know the next big thing that needs to happen is that Entities can currently not at all handle changes in their resources. Like, why animal-taming knowledge doesn't do much at the moment; the civ just doesn't know how to take that information and turn it into a proper tame animal-resource you can select at embark. That's why the entity rewrite of the law and customs arc is a minimum necessity for further economic development. (And coincidentally will also allow civs to generate starting scenarios better )

I dunno, I always see a lot of 'toady doesn't care about x, he only cares about y', (eg adventure mode above fort mode) but really the current arc is all about making sure there's cool late game challenges for forts that otherwise would steamroll over all the enemies, with the proper villain AI and interactions making even if you can steamroll, the steamrolling a true narrative spectacle. Similarly, the ordering of the dev goals seems to be geared towards having as few rewrites as possible by having more ontologically fundamental systems (myth, magic, map rewrite, more generated beings) go before the social ones(better, smarter civs, starting scenarios, boats, economy).

[Azerty]

So, in your scenario, a Legendary Miller might work longer than a Dabbling one?

Sorry if I was unclear. No, the Legendary will still be able to do the job faster/better than a Proficient, just not noticeably so, and certainly not with enough gain in speed and/or quality to justify the time & effort of his working all the way up to Legendary. A lowly Dabbler, meanwhile, is going to waste time making mistakes the first few attempts (possibly even ruining a bag of grain or two), but getting the hang of it soon enough.

While having titles for skills levels not have a great importance for extensive fields (that is, fields easy to learn but with diminishing returns) might be seen as useless, in the future, such evidence of experience might give them political and social clout (for exemple, a Legendary Miller might be elected head of a Millers' guild).

Moreover, it will make a majority of the population work in the fields, which was the situation before the Agricultural Revolution of the 1780s.

Precisely. Of course, I'm not trying to force people to play their game in a certain way, but it just feels wrong for such a (generally) realistic game to do a major disservice to what's been all of humanity's predominant occupation ever since the dawn of civilization. I'm all for procedurally generated cultural differences between one civ & the next, but honestly there doesn't seem to be much room for variance here. Besides, it's difficult to take pride in your supposedly "productive, successful" fortress when every time you scroll through the Units list, 2/3^rds of them are No Job or doing leisure activities.

And if differences in soil productivity are introduced, making sand nearly worthless while black soil very productive then we could have even more differences, with sites basing their economies on exporting food (see Ukraine) while some sites could have to devote themselves to craftwork in order to have more food (Switzerland).

[GoblinCookie]

*Sigh* This has been on my wish list for a while now. Not just food, anything really. Once the FPS drops too much babysitting the game becomes impossible so anything that lets us set things to function without intervention would be great.

Regarding the economy, I can certainly understand GC's view about development of the economy being a core priority. I'd imagine the reason it isn't would be due to the difficulty of balancing something that is dynamic by it's very nature. The way items are represented in game doesn't help matters with varying quality and materials, but there are ways around that. Toady seems to want to prioritize new gameplay for the upcoming releases (magic, starting scenarios), and not having an economy certainly would make those releases easier. Whether that's the optimal strategy is another question of course, but given that he has tried implementing an economy before I'd imagine he's likely already thinking about what needs to change to get those economic interactions working. The code for villian networks could be used as the basis for companies or other organizations, and the society arc would govern how groups interact at a site/civ level. The economy arc may never really happen as a discrete development cycle but rather slowly get built up in the background until one day Toady turns his attention to market dynamics and finance. I could easily see that being folded into the starting scenarios arc. But that's depend on how much the underlying code base needs to change to make that happen. I really have no idea about that.

The problem was always that they were thinking in terms of 'implementing the economy' at all.  The economy is not a separate feature in the game, the economy is the sum of all other features meaning that everything development in the game world needs to be thought of as a development to the economy or it will not fit together with the other elements.  At the moment we are creating farming sites in the vicinity of the major sites, in spite of how the productivity of agriculture means there is simply no real economic basis for their existance; or rather there is no harmony between the fortress mode economy and the general world-gen economy that needs to be 'frozen' for reasons I do not understand once world-gen is finished. 

If we implement starting scenarios without the economy, we will simply multiply the problem that we already have.  Developed in isolation from the wider economic context, they will create their own internal economies just as the present 'embark' does, each with their own separate and localized warped economic rules designed to get around the limitations of their own starting scenario in it's isolated environment.  It will simply not be possible to cobble together all the starting scenarios with their reality-warping economic arrangements into a larger whole, they are by nature discordant since all of them ignore any higher order to make their own scenario work smoothly without any consequences that are not fun to the player. 

So, in your scenario, a Legendary Miller might work longer than a Dabbling one?

Sorry if I was unclear. No, the Legendary will still be able to do the job faster/better than a Proficient, just not noticeably so, and certainly not with enough gain in speed and/or quality to justify the time & effort of his working all the way up to Legendary. A lowly Dabbler, meanwhile, is going to waste time making mistakes the first few attempts (possibly even ruining a bag of grain or two), but getting the hang of it soon enough.

While having titles for skills levels not have a great importance for extensive fields (that is, fields easy to learn but with diminishing returns) might be seen as useless, in the future, such evidence of experience might give them political and social clout (for exemple, a Legendary Miller might be elected head of a Millers' guild).

Moreover, it will make a majority of the population work in the fields, which was the situation before the Agricultural Revolution of the 1780s.

Precisely. Of course, I'm not trying to force people to play their game in a certain way, but it just feels wrong for such a (generally) realistic game to do a major disservice to what's been all of humanity's predominant occupation ever since the dawn of civilization. I'm all for procedurally generated cultural differences between one civ & the next, but honestly there doesn't seem to be much room for variance here. Besides, it's difficult to take pride in your supposedly "productive, successful" fortress when every time you scroll through the Units list, 2/3^rds of them are No Job or doing leisure activities.

And if differences in soil productivity are introduced, making sand nearly worthless while black soil very productive then we could have even more differences, with sites basing their economies on exporting food (see Ukraine) while some sites could have to devote themselves to craftwork in order to have more food (Switzerland).

Except that with those rules nobody would set up their site on a sandy area to begin with, they would simply send occasional parties of dwarves to the nearby sandy wilderness to gather up the limited amount of sand that they would need to fulfill their limited demand for glass while living on the rich soil area because their demand for food is so much greater than their demand for sand.  The problem we have here is much of real-life economics do not make sense at all and since they do not make sense we cannot really properly model them in the game.  We simply add the surface appearance of the socio-economic elements in because they SHOULD be in (in other words we do so ideologically) but the whole house is a sky-castle built upon nothing. 

This is fine for the purposes of a game in a limited context, which is what we present are.  It gives us complete freedom to do what we like, to settle wherever we like without regard to the small matter that no economic basis exists to support our choices.  The once we create an actual economic basis for the world however, we will find our freedom as players drastically limited, so the real question is "do we actually not have an economy because we really don't want one?".

It would be great if we could have trade agreements that let us automatically buy a bunch of food from other sites. That way we wouldn't need to devote the space and labor ourselves.

The 'automatically' part is incompatible with the economy but very compatible with the present situation where the fortress is the only place the economy exists and all imported items are magicked into existence to meet it's limited demands.  Once the economy exists there is no way to guarantee there even *is* a food surplus at all for us to automatically import, the other problem is that there may well be a food surplus but not one that anyone is willing to go through the labour of shipping food across to the world to our isolated fortress that chose as it's starting scenario the designation 'mine'.

I generally feel the dwarven economy should develop in the following manner.

1. Isolated fortress that produces everything it needs itself and only imports a small amount of raw materials lacking in it's environment.  This I will will call +Central Fortress.
2. As the population of the +Central Fortress grows beyond the capacity of the local area to feed it the isolated fortress sets up nearby food collection sites specialized to producing desired foodstuffs.
3. As the food collection sites increase in size, their food surplus declines causing more food sites to continually be created.
4. The large number of food collection sites continue to create a surplus of food but the increased population specialized in food production creates a scarcity of manufactured goods. 
5. +Central Fortress increases in it's population again as it employs a large number of dwarves to produce more manufactured goods.
6. +Central Fortress's manufacturing grows beyond the capacity of the local area to provide it with the needed materials, driving it to set up specialized resource sites.
7. As the number of these resource sites increases, they exhaust the transport capacity of the +Central Fortress when combined with the need to also ship food to these new sites. 
8a. Specialized trading sites are set up by the +Central Fortress to drive up it's transport capacity to maintain Status Quo in other matters.
8b. Individual resource sites develop food production and manufacturing capacities, becoming a +Central Fortress.  <Return to 1>

Stage 8 is interesting because it is the only stage at which politics actually presents a genuine choice and involves a conflict of interest.  In all other stages the outcome is predictable and politics is purely technocratic, your leaders are either competent enough to organize the next stage or else they are not and trouble strikes.  Consider that the specialized trading sites are not producing any wealth but instead they are consuming wealth while performing a service to the +Central Fortress in ensuring that none of it's resource sites need to de-specialize and in so doing supplant it's role. 

The four groups +Central Fortress, food sites, resource sites and trade sites pretty much cover the majority of the starting scenarios.  The present AI fortress populations are too small (as is the player's fortress) to ever allow us to get beyond Stage 1; this means the dwarf economy requires un-playable large fortresses with populations of thousands to grow out of the original small fortresses, that we already have.  In order to maintain play-ability for player fortresses that have so upgraded we will need a district system, where the original fortress becomes the central district of the larger city we control in a more abstract fashion.

Because the economy restricts what starting scenarios we can choose at any given point, we need the economy to be visible in world generation so that players can deliberately end world-gen at certain worlds at points in history that facilitate us being able to play the starting scenario we want.  We could even define our chosen starting scenario when initializing world-gen and have world-gen automatically end once it becomes viable for our chosen civilization or in general. 

[thompson]

Well, the economy *could* be balanced differently to the real world to allow small settlements to be viable. If DF agriculture is 10x as productive as middle ages agriculture you still have an economy - food is just cheap so it shifts towards more manufacturing and services. There's still a big question about what a DF economy would even look like. Gameplay is likely to take precedence over realism, so it may not be a "real" economy at all but rather some mechanisms cobbled together to create the illusion of an economy.

This discussion is all well and good in theory, but in practice there is already a significant code base that has been built up without a central economic engine, so refactoring that will take time. Clearly it has been designated a lower priority than Myth+Magic. If the code is designed in a reasonably modular way a proper economy could be built in parallel to it at a later date.