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[Squirrelloid]

So unless you'd like to develop a fully realized example that I can actually examine in detail, I don't think any such problem would be encountered.  (Unless of course you think johnny one-note fortresses should be encouraged.  Yes, they completely fail in this model because they drive their own price down into nothing.  This is a good thing).

Do you think it should not be possible for a single fortress to become well known for producing one item / group of items better than / different to the rest of whatever DF world-gen they are inhabiting?
It should be risky, but I don't agree it should be impossible to succeed with it.

It depends on how many you produce and sell, and what the demand for them is.  Regardless, you're going to increase the supply of any items you produce.  Since marketing doesn't exist in the technology period DF is modelling, you can't artificially inflate demand from others.  Thus, the very act of producing excess goods (goods beyond which are needed for your fortress) is going to exert downward pressure on the market for that good.

Now, can a one-good fortress be sustainable?  Sure, if it doesn't flood the market.   For some level of exportation there will be an equillibrium price.  But you can't just dump goods on the market, you need to supply at a rate appropriate to the demand.  This has plenty of analogs in the real world, especially historically via guilds and in modern times via government farming subsidies, where organizations took it upon themselves to limit supply of goods for whom the natural supply was too high relative to demand so as to drive the prices down below what is considered reasonable.  (eg, the US pays farmers not to plant crops to keep the price of crops from getting too low).

You could also demand the same goods you're selling to artificially inflate demand, but there's little reason to do this while goods sold and goods bought all go through the government.  If individual dwarves sold items to the caravan, then there'd be a reason to have the government demand for goods that their people are producing excess quantities of (artificially inflate demand).  A modern example of this practice is the US government buying and destroying milk to maintain a reasonable price/gallon. 

[Quift]

Off course a one produce fort should be viable. A antique marble quarry would export nothing but marble blocks, and import picks and food. Most villages exported mostly food produce such as grain, salted meat, cattle, and hides, and imported cloth, metalwares, and eventyally some crafts and trinkets.

In general there are only two main problems with the economy at present, the abundance of food, and the weird demand for felsite and dolomite mugs decorated with goblin bone. Exports/imports should be more alike the goods above, for which there should be a solid demand, as these are the necesities of daily life.

I would also add that I normally do not consider the game to represent the high middle ages. Antiquity is a better historical analogy. The lack of steel amongst humans, the city-state like nature of civs, battles being minor, lack of fundemental finanicials and banking etc. the medieval stasis of most fantasy settings is quite unimaginative, not to mention weird if their total absence of many of the things that made the medieval ages the founding of early modern era. Consider that Tolkien set most of his stories in an age more related to what is generally refered to as the dark ages, remembering empires lost.

[Squirrelloid]

Off course a one produce fort should be viable. A antique marble quarry would export nothing but marble blocks, and import picks and food. Most villages exported mostly food produce such as grain, salted meat, cattle, and hides, and imported cloth, metalwares, and eventyally some crafts and trinkets.

Yes, but such fortresses should also not grow arbitrarily (to some arbitrary population cap).  If you want a small quarry village, its perfectly doable with a reasonable population cap (<=50) because you'll be unlikely to flood the market.  Especially since the price of marble should be relatively inelastic, and demand should be rather large.  Its things like *Giant Cave Spider Silk Dress* that should risk market flooding and price collapse, because the market is small.

So, on the one hand, building and production goods should have large demand, and thus be hard/impossible to exhaust the market.  On the other hand, part of the problem is that immigration in DF is based on how much wealth you've produced, not how much demand for additional labor you have (which would have capped the population of these small villages historically).  (And of course that a dwarf is capable of doing vastly more work than a person - one dwarf can haul pyramid-building blocks of limestone much faster than a team of slaves could pull them).

In general there are only two main problems with the economy at present, the abundance of food, and the weird demand for felsite and dolomite mugs decorated with goblin bone. Exports/imports should be more alike the goods above, for which there should be a solid demand, as these are the necesities of daily life.

I agree.  Of course, that comes down to tweaking what you think the Supply and Demand functions for various goods are and how you plan on grouping things.  (Ie, how do you handle decorated objects).

I would also add that I normally do not consider the game to represent the high middle ages. Antiquity is a better historical analogy. The lack of steel amongst humans, the city-state like nature of civs, battles being minor, lack of fundemental finanicials and banking etc. the medieval stasis of most fantasy settings is quite unimaginative, not to mention weird if their total absence of many of the things that made the medieval ages the founding of early modern era. Consider that Tolkien set most of his stories in an age more related to what is generally refered to as the dark ages, remembering empires lost.

Judging time period really depends on what aspects you look at.  I've seen a ~1400 date used elsewhere, and that seems a reasonable assessment. (Crossbows and the range of mechanical assemblies available are both certainly post dark ages, for instance).  You might also note that battles being minor really depends on where you want to look - its reminiscent of low overall population - admirably modelling europe's dark ages.  The story in China is quite different (the Three Kingdoms period precedes imperial Rome and involved rather massive armies), and Roman battles often involved armies of multiple legions (each legion being 60-120 men depending on when in Rome's history you're talking).  Even the Spartan stance at Thermopylae involved 300 Spartans on the vastly outnumbered side.  So finding a point in time in which small scale battles were the norm is just indicative of a population bottleneck unless we go back to Sumer or somesuch, and even then our records are so poor we have no idea how large armies were.  Given the presence of worked Iron and Steel, its fairly safe to say that Sumer is too far back.

That said, guild-style regulation of who gets to participate in labors goes back before the high middle ages, possibly into the dark ages.  I wouldn't be surprised if there were analogs in Rome or earlier.  The ideas of limiting competition and setting standards isn't something hard to figure out for most people.

[Mikademus]

(As a specialist in the field I find the buzz-word misuse disenheartening to say the least).

The Blowhard flame warrior type

Grand Unified Theory, whenever the physicists finally discover it, will in fact be the way the universe actually works.  I've got a physicist friend who is reasonably certain Quantum is a true description of reality and not just a model.  Special Relativity is most likely a true description of reality. ... ultimately there will be a description so accurate it'll be telling us what the real thing is doing.  ... Natural Selection is real.  It actually happens.  Its not a theory, its a LAW derived logically.  That NS leads to evolution is a theory.  S/D models are to Natural Selection like Micro-econ is to evolution.  They're both component true statements best known for feeding into a larger model.

The Tireless Rebutter flame warrior type
The Filibuster flame warrior type

It MAY be how the universe really works, but that we will never know. Few physicist worth their mettle believe that their models reveal the truth of reality, though they may believe that they are providing more or less accurate (in the sense of "corresponding to" or "aligned with") representations of observed reality. If your physicist friend believes that "Quantum" (I take it you're referring to quantum physics?) is how the universe really works then that's unfortunate for him. However, it is a very common fallacy and he isn't the first one to fall for it. In fact, Ptolemy was convinced he understood the Nature of Creation, as was Newton. Their contemporaries believed they had the Ultimate Explanation. Special Relativity is just a special case of Einstein's later General Theory of Relativity, and it is interesting that you think, with your friend, that quantum physics and special relativity are how the universe works since general relativity (and especially the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics) are incompatible, in particular at the Planck scale. Study up on the latest takes on super string theory for how both relativity and quantum physics may be very off. I got a physicist friend (several, in fact). I have another friend that believes in aliens. That doesn't mean I have to believe what they do. Point is, physics is about developing models. So it evolution. And so is economics.

Reaching an understanding of reality through the pure application of logics is a fine art with old traditions. The Greek excelled at it. They were quite often rather out there, but hey, it was logical! Especially syllogisms, which you want to prove reality through, was the means. Nowadays syllogisms are rather inadequate as a scientific tool: in fact I don't know any science today recognised as serious that has used it since the 1840's. It is still common in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, though. Logics, as mathematics, are incomplete languages. If you're interested in these topics I'd be pleased to direct you to Cantor, Frege (and Russel), Kant, Goedel, Wittgenstein and Kuhn (also peruse Karl Popper when reading Kuhn), in order. Some reading of later criticism of Auguste Comte too might prove illuminating.

Likening S/D to natural selection is using a rhetoric device to slip in something less certain by attaching it to something more convincing. S/D is observable from within our paradigm. To claim the S/D as observed within our political and social context have always worked that way and that microeconomic theory is a correct representation of reality is... interesting. Please submit a paper claiming that to your professor and ask him for an honest review of your claims.

[Pilsu]

Um, I could write code to do it myself from the description I gave in the OP.  It wouldn't even be hard.  (The hard part would be tuning the functions for supply and demand, but that's ultimately an exercise in tuning, not a theoretical difficulty).

How do you do that without destroying the trading aspect of the game? And how do you fit the communal psyche of dwarves into capitalism?

I have no idea what Hearts of Iron is...

You control entire countries, not villages

And, um... limiting supply is even more realistic given the tiny size of settlements.  Regardless, I never actually proposed the caravans offerings be modified in their content, just that their prices reflect supply and demand, and can vary over time (rather than being absolute values).

"Civilizations" having 2 3x3 settlements with 200 people each would result in little to no supply of anything and absolutely no room for any kind of demand. Being a dedicated craftsman is pretty difficult if there's 400 people in the country. Why would the other race undermine it's own craftsmen by buying your shit? They can make desks too

Civs need to actually be civs before you even humor simulated economy. You can't specialize in carpentry without a country to support it. The poor farmers built their own houses back then

Clothes eventually wear out, so there is turn over.    I'm not convinced your selling fine clothes has the effect you ascribe.  If they can't afford yours, they'll buy another one cheaper elsewhere.  If you produce many more than are demanded, the price will drop.  If you continue to overproduce, you'll reduce the value of those goods to next to nothing.  Markets self-correct problems like those.

I'm selling my clothes to peasants. First of all, clothes beyond the basic level would be worthless since no one could actually afford them. Second of all, clothes wearing out stimulating demand is fucking laughable in a preindustrialization society. I still have boots my grand grandfather wore and they still keep the water out just fine. There'd essentially be a hardcap on the amount of clothes you can sell and even then no one would actually pay anything for them since they are expensive. Peasant societies do not have demand for luxury. In fact, they knit their own shirts, making my dedicated production useless

Unless of course you think johnny one-note fortresses should be encouraged.  Yes, they completely fail in this model because they drive their own price down into nothing.  This is a good thing

Remind me, if every fort produces everything just to have any kind of demand for their stuff, why is anyone trading anything anymore? Only thing anyone would want to buy is raw materials and those couldn't be bought unless the mining town you want gold from conveniently has no trees around it whatsoever. It'd be really rare to have anything of worth at all


Yes, it's realistic for the player to barely scrape by. Life was absolute shit back then if you weren't high class. My grandfather worked every day all day and still couldn't get fucking anything done beyond basic sustenance. Yeah, realistic. Why would I want to play a game that fucking tedious?


Only thing your suggestions accomplish is to create a hard cap on the demand for anything that isn't a consumable. And it fails to address why obsidian mugs decorated with gold have any kind of demand at all in a peasant village. I can hear you say, they shouldn't. Okay, NOW what? What do they want? Food? Is that it? Only thing I can make in the fucking game that doesn't quickly turn worthless is food? Yeah, great. So much for buying anything

[Squirrelloid]

Um, I could write code to do it myself from the description I gave in the OP.  It wouldn't even be hard.  (The hard part would be tuning the functions for supply and demand, but that's ultimately an exercise in tuning, not a theoretical difficulty).

How do you do that without destroying the trading aspect of the game? And how do you fit the communal psyche of dwarves into capitalism?

The trading aspect of the game is utterly pointless as it is now.  Notable flaws include:

1) Its too easy to just buy out every caravan.  Fortresses produce too much value relative to the amount of goods caravans bring.
2) Despite the capability of buying out the caravan, much of what the caravan brings is absolute junk you don't want, so you have to *give away* most of your production simply to clear it out to have room to make more.
3) Crazy absolute pricing, like Iron being worth as much as silver, which leads to the discovery of a single magnetite cluster meaning you don't care about over half the metals you find because you have so much iron that is simply worth much more than those metals.  (Seriously, wtf?).  And lets not talk about *Dwarven Syrup Roast* [50].
4) People buy crap that is completely worthless to them.  Like you dumping all the Narrow garbage from the goblins on unsuspecting merchants.  (In my proposed system, the value of goblin clothing is approximately zero for virtually all merchants because the supply is infinitely greater than the demand).

The communal aspects?  You mean the nobles who make outrageous demands and the economy which kicks dwarves out of housing that is insanely expensive despite its being abundant and underused?  The only communal aspect I can think of is that everything produced by the dwarves is owned by the fortress, which mostly seems to be a way of oppressing the masses and having the elites thumb their noses at the hard working dwarves who make stuff so they can walk off with it, while paying them a pittance of its value for their labor (via government wages).

And, um... limiting supply is even more realistic given the tiny size of settlements.  Regardless, I never actually proposed the caravans offerings be modified in their content, just that their prices reflect supply and demand, and can vary over time (rather than being absolute values).

"Civilizations" having 2 3x3 settlements with 200 people each would result in little to no supply of anything and absolutely no room for any kind of demand. Being a dedicated craftsman is pretty difficult if there's 400 people in the country. Why would the other race undermine it's own craftsmen by buying your shit? They can make desks too.

Because presumably they can't make everything they need.  Why do you trade with caravans at all, again?

Civs need to actually be civs before you even humor simulated economy. You can't specialize in carpentry without a country to support it. The poor farmers built their own houses back then

What do houses have to do with what Carpenters do in DF?

More seriously, you become the mountainhome somewhere around 150-200 dwarves.  Elites will drive much of the demand for luxury goods, including Nobles and Legendaries (military and non).  Since government handles all the trade transactions, the fact that these individuals don't pay for goods internally just means they have some sort of share in the government that entitles them to profits.

I'd expect far higher trade volumes in production goods.  You'll note that a single dwarf can use something like 100 bars of iron in a couple seasons if he works constantly.  I've seen a clothier use >100 pieces of cloth in less than a season.  I imagine humans aren't quite so productive, but nonetheless the demand for thread, cloth, metal, stone, gems, and similar intermediate goods should be high.

Clothes eventually wear out, so there is turn over.    I'm not convinced your selling fine clothes has the effect you ascribe.  If they can't afford yours, they'll buy another one cheaper elsewhere.  If you produce many more than are demanded, the price will drop.  If you continue to overproduce, you'll reduce the value of those goods to next to nothing.  Markets self-correct problems like those.

I'm selling my clothes to peasants. First of all, clothes beyond the basic level would be worthless since no one could actually afford them. Second of all, clothes wearing out stimulating demand is fucking laughable in a preindustrialization society. I still have boots my grand grandfather wore and they still keep the water out just fine. There'd essentially be a hardcap on the amount of clothes you can sell and even then no one would actually pay anything for them since they are expensive. Peasant societies do not have demand for luxury. In fact, they knit their own shirts, making my dedicated production useless

Every good should have some sort of obsolescence schedule.  Its why people need to keep buying more stuff.  Food and drink gets consumed, clothing wears out, etc...  Sure, you may have boots from your grandfather, but do you wear them *every single day*?  Seriously, why do people keep making boots if old ones never wear out?

Softer clothing wears out even faster - I've got a shirt that's 16 years old and has held up remarkably well, but other shirts that are unfit for anything but around-the-house wear that only lasted 3-5 years.  Clearly if I am to maintain sufficient clothes I need to buy more. 

I'd expect the peasants to buy the cloth and sew their own, but they still have to buy the cloth.

The two basic rules are
(1) You can't produce everything need (or its grossly inefficient to do so)
(2) You can trade your surplus for other people's surplus.

If either of those fails to be true, there is no trade, and having it in the game is pointless. 

Unless of course you think johnny one-note fortresses should be encouraged.  Yes, they completely fail in this model because they drive their own price down into nothing.  This is a good thing

Remind me, if every fort produces everything just to have any kind of demand for their stuff, why is anyone trading anything anymore? Only thing anyone would want to buy is raw materials and those couldn't be bought unless the mining town you want gold from conveniently has no trees around it whatsoever. It'd be really rare to have anything of worth at all

Not everything.  But not just making masterwork silk shirts either.  You might focus on the entire clothing industry.  Be too narrow and you'll flood your own market (with the production capacity possible in DF).  Be too wide, and you won't need to trade for anything at all. 

Of course, there are also site-specific resources that you may desire.  Metals you don't have (or gemstones), glass objects, etc....  Other settlements should similarly have a limited range of local resources.

Yes, it's realistic for the player to barely scrape by. Life was absolute shit back then if you weren't high class. My grandfather worked every day all day and still couldn't get fucking anything done beyond basic sustenance. Yeah, realistic. Why would I want to play a game that fucking tedious?

Why do you imagine scraping by?  It turns the trade game into an actual game where you need to plan your economy to maximize your profits in the economy, which might be rather different from game to game (depending on which civs survive and how many settlements they found).  As it stands now, you just overproduce a few things that are worth crazy amounts of money and empty caravans.

Only thing your suggestions accomplish is to create a hard cap on the demand for anything that isn't a consumable. And it fails to address why obsidian mugs decorated with gold have any kind of demand at all in a peasant village. I can hear you say, they shouldn't. Okay, NOW what? What do they want? Food? Is that it? Only thing I can make in the fucking game that doesn't quickly turn worthless is food? Yeah, great. So much for buying anything

Sigh, there are no peasant villages.  Every settlement has at least one noble.  That noble can demand crazy things to his heart's content (up to the spending capacity of the settlement).  Bigger settlements have crazier nobles with bigger purses.  Why do you think I attributed the buying power of the wealthiest individual as a crazy 50% of the settlement's buying power?

And every good type needs to implement obsolescence.  Goods that are infinite in duration are stupid.

[Pilsu]

1) Its too easy to just buy out every caravan.  Fortresses produce too much value relative to the amount of goods caravans bring.

More to do with the ridiculous price increase caused by any kind of quality handiwork. Well, that and the exponentially increasing speed of labor

Should be more like
-125%
+150%
*175%
≡200%
☼300%

Masterwork prices are laughably inflated right now but I figure Toady wants that. Toned it down quite a bit though

2) Despite the capability of buying out the caravan, much of what the caravan brings is absolute junk you don't want, so you have to *give away* most of your production simply to clear it out to have room to make more.

If I could actually buy exceptional and masterwork furniture instead of junk masterfully decorated with something stupid like cloth, I would. Until then, I'm highly interested in metals of various kinds and gems. Dwarf's preference for say, bloodstone has a dramatic effect on his room value if it's used. It'd be nice if I could commission the humans to do it for me if I don't feel like having a carpenter in a glacier fort

Raw materials are a bit too cheap right now. Wouldn't mind paying 10x the real price for materials. I'd still stand to make a profit and that shipment of solid gold bars might feel as such. I don't need to be able to afford all of it by year 2

3) Crazy absolute pricing, like Iron being worth as much as silver, which leads to the discovery of a single magnetite cluster meaning you don't care about over half the metals you find because you have so much iron that is simply worth much more than those metals.  (Seriously, wtf?).  And lets not talk about *Dwarven Syrup Roast* [50].

More of a problem of the iron being usable for everything. Rings, goblets, you name it. If it wasn't, jewelry metals would retain some importance

Don't think you should be even able to sell prepared meals but they're a placeholder anyway

4) People buy crap that is completely worthless to them.  Like you dumping all the Narrow garbage from the goblins on unsuspecting merchants.  (In my proposed system, the value of goblin clothing is approximately zero for virtually all merchants because the supply is infinitely greater than the demand).

It's only valuable because luxury materials aren't segregated and thus they randomly use giant cave spider silk. Without that, it'd be worthless junk

I wouldn't mind making clothes that actually fit my customers, even if technically they might be just selling them onwards or.. having a lot of fat babies. What size do elves wear again? Stuff that doesn't fit should probably get a significant value penalty. It can still be peddled to the next village

Let's face it, most of the things you can make ARE worthless or very quickly become so if value is simulated. And the stuff that would have reasonable value like precious metals and gems runs out really, really quickly. Same for food. Selling and buying raw materials should probably have a price modifier to make it even worth bothering with. Makes it less ridiculous to buy an iron bar and two and multiply it's value by a zillion by making armor

The only communal aspect I can think of is that everything produced by the dwarves is owned by the fortress, which mostly seems to be a way of oppressing the masses and having the elites thumb their noses at the hard working dwarves who make stuff so they can walk off with it, while paying them a pittance of its value for their labor (via government wages).

Yes, well, how do you fit an economy based on masterful overpriced mugs and other luxury crap on that? Dwarves are more like communists than anything, even when the nobles arrive and impose their inane vision of economy on them

Because presumably they can't make everything they need.  Why do you trade with caravans at all, again?

To get stuff that isn't in infinite supply. And to acquire said things I need to make things that are in infinite supply. Like glass

They don't *need* glass. Especially if they have to trade a wagonful of food for a single clear glass window. Same for mugs. They don't need overpriced garbage. I mean, gold is overpriced garbage but at least it holds some cultural value. What's the value of a goblin skull with shards of green glass in it? I can't make anything they need that they can't already make themselves. Well okay, for the first year of the fort I might find gold and stuff. And then abandon my fort since everything of value was exhausted. Not really fun now is it?

What do houses have to do with what Carpenters do in DF?

Carpenters make tables too

Really, would you import crap that someone in your own community is already capable of making? And I'm not talking of this mockery of today where electricity is both exported and imported at the same time. Guess someone must be looking after us behind the curtain if system like this is functional

More seriously, you become the mountainhome somewhere around 150-200 dwarves.  Elites will drive much of the demand for luxury goods, including Nobles and Legendaries (military and non).  Since government handles all the trade transactions, the fact that these individuals don't pay for goods internally just means they have some sort of share in the government that entitles them to profits.

Yes but the demand won't be very long lasting if my massive mountain home has 200 guys in it. Even if all of them bought a set of silverware, that'd maybe take a year to acquire after which silver would effectively be worthless again

Modern economics deal with billions of people. Don't really mix with olden times

I'd expect far higher trade volumes in production goods.  You'll note that a single dwarf can use something like 100 bars of iron in a couple seasons if he works constantly.  I've seen a clothier use >100 pieces of cloth in less than a season.  I imagine humans aren't quite so productive, but nonetheless the demand for thread, cloth, metal, stone, gems, and similar intermediate goods should be high.

That's all well and good but how long will that demand last if the end products are useless? Should the government buy my socks and chasm them to keep the mockery of an economy going? I'm sure you see what I did there

Every good should have some sort of obsolescence schedule.  Its why people need to keep buying more stuff.  Food and drink gets consumed, clothing wears out, etc...  Sure, you may have boots from your grandfather, but do you wear them *every single day*?  Seriously, why do people keep making boots if old ones never wear out?

We were conditioned to be wasteful to facilitate modern economics. Very few things actually need to be consistently replaced. Very few things were replaced back then

Softer clothing wears out even faster - I've got a shirt that's 16 years old and has held up remarkably well, but other shirts that are unfit for anything but around-the-house wear that only lasted 3-5 years.  Clearly if I am to maintain sufficient clothes I need to buy more.

Your "rags" were luxury back then. Most clothes were made at home out of crude thread. Perhaps dyed with berries and the like. I couldn't quite pass for a noble wearing cotton but I'd certainly be considered wealthy

Your "need" to buy new clothes every 3 years 6 months to impress the girls is based on modern values

I'd expect the peasants to buy the cloth and sew their own, but they still have to buy the cloth.

They probably wouldn't buy ≡cloth≡ with ≡dye≡ since they couldn't afford it

The two basic rules are
(1) You can't produce everything need (or its grossly inefficient to do so)
(2) You can trade your surplus for other people's surplus.

If either of those fails to be true, there is no trade, and having it in the game is pointless.

It's in the game to provide the player with stuff he wants. And as stated already, my surplus quickly vanishes and the stuff that doesn't run out is quickly worthless

Not everything.  But not just making masterwork silk shirts either.  You might focus on the entire clothing industry.  Be too narrow and you'll flood your own market (with the production capacity possible in DF).  Be too wide, and you won't need to trade for anything at all.

Flooding the market for luxury clothes would take a decade at most

Yeah, wouldn't hurt if there was an incentive to make a full suit of armor instead of several chest plates

Why do you imagine scraping by?  It turns the trade game into an actual game where you need to plan your economy to maximize your profits in the economy, which might be rather different from game to game (depending on which civs survive and how many settlements they found).  As it stands now, you just overproduce a few things that are worth crazy amounts of money and empty caravans.

Yeah, since statistics really make for a fun game

You want realism in the economy. But if the economy is realistic, I can't produce anything of value on my site after the demand for clothes vanishes. Poverty is inevitable

And every good type needs to implement obsolescence.  Goods that are infinite in duration are stupid.

Throwing away your shirt after 2 years is laughable considering the time period. If you measure this stuff in decades, yes, there would eventually be demand for another 3 mugs. However, the game quickly becomes tedious if you start making it realistic. You can't buy anything once you run out of gold ore, sieges never arrive since goblins take 12 years to mature etc. Those smoked meats won't get you anything fancy


Basically, my site can't infinitely generate gold. Other sites can. I can't compete with that

[LegoLord]

I really don't see how you're gonna model economics in a game this crude

DF is a work in progress Pilsu.  It is not done yet.  At some point this could be implemented.  Current coding is not a valid counter argument when you speak of a game in its alpha stages.

Anyway, the real problem with this is that supply and demand in medieval times was really only a local thing; merchants going to other countries would of course take into account such things, but international (much less global) trade was fairly small scale back then, because everyone just wanted to stay on the homeland.  As for global . . . Most of Europe didn't even know half the globe even existed in the fourteenth century.

[Mikademus]

Every good should have some sort of obsolescence schedule.  Its why people need to keep buying more stuff.  Food and drink gets consumed, clothing wears out, etc...  Sure, you may have boots from your grandfather, but do you wear them *every single day*?  Seriously, why do people keep making boots if old ones never wear out?

We were conditioned to be wasteful to facilitate modern economics. Very few things actually need to be consistently replaced. Very few things were replaced back then

...

Why do you imagine scraping by?  It turns the trade game into an actual game where you need to plan your economy to maximize your profits in the economy, which might be rather different from game to game (depending on which civs survive and how many settlements they found).  As it stands now, you just overproduce a few things that are worth crazy amounts of money and empty caravans.

Yeah, since statistics really make for a fun game

Basically, Pilsu nails it. Taking a wider perspective, which means opening your eyes to and accepting a wider set of negative externalities, current S/D is a deeply suboptimal and not at all perfect or representative of all history for that matter. Also, Squirrelloid's suggestion wouldn't make for a fun game. In fact it would make for a game somewhere between the absence of fun and the antithesis of fun.

[Granite26]

I think you are worse than wrong there...

I'm going to go with Squirrel here : As long as you can produce enough to survive on in a given fort, trade should be based on what other people want and need, not some inane hard set value that has people sending their hard earned food and iron to your fort to get the 42342343th in a set of 23423423423 stone mugs.

As for global trade... don't believe everything your history books tell you... It was a pretty big deal, just because Europe wasn't sending goods to China doesn't mean that the Silk Road and Indian Ocean trade didn't link Europe, Asia, North Africa, India, and Madagascar into one big trading network.

Even primative peoples are smart enough to stop buying microcline flutes after the first thousand or so...

[Pilsu]

Variety should be encouraged of course but creating a market saturation mechanic would just make players unable to make anything of value. If it's the silly kind where people throw away their brass tubas every 2 years, it undermines the economy simulation's entire point

[Footkerchief]

I'm going to go with Squirrel here : As long as you can produce enough to survive on in a given fort, trade should be based on what other people want and need, not some inane hard set value that has people sending their hard earned food and iron to your fort to get the 42342343th in a set of 23423423423 stone mugs.

I agree completely, but this...

The long-term Merchant Arc proposes that the real economy is somehow set by these caravans.  There are no details as to how.  By this statement I greatly doubt ToadyOne means to actually alter how prices are calculated [...]

... what?  Here's what the Merchant Arc says:

# MERCHANT: With the Caravan Arc, we have traders moving around the world, but I said over there that I didn't want to mess around too much with having a real economy, or it would surely fall apart and all the towns would starve. Once I get up the nerve to tackle these problems, it would be a lot of fun to play a merchant or guild yourself.

In other words, having a real economy IS the goal of the Merchant Arc.  The consequent necessity for supply and demand is so obvious that it without saying.  That said, it's a long-term arc for a reason -- large-scale trade can't work sensibly until a lot of other components are in place, and Toady doesn't seem interested in adding more half-baked placeholders at this point.

[Granite26]

Variety should be encouraged of course but creating a market saturation mechanic would just make players unable to make anything of value. If it's the silly kind where people throw away their brass tubas every 2 years, it undermines the economy simulation's entire point

Yeah, don't disagree wholesale with this.  I mean, mugs and whatnot should have a short scale, but maybe not high level expensive items.  Sure a tuba will last forever, but that's why they are expensive...

Basically:  Artificially creating unrealistic needs for new items = bad, Baseline need for new items that feels realistic = good

[Mikademus]

I think you are worse than wrong there...

I'm going to go with Squirrel here : As long as you can produce enough to survive on in a given fort, trade should be based on what other people want and need, not some inane hard set value that has people sending their hard earned food and iron to your fort to get the 42342343th in a set of 23423423423 stone mugs.

I'm not certain but I think you were addressing this at me. You're setting me up a straw man but ok. There are two discussions going on here. On the one hand is the claim that current micro and macro theory are perfect representations of actual reality.  Then there is the claim that an obsessively ultra-detailed economy (meaning implementing an entire textbook of Economy 101, all ~1000 pages or so) would make DF a fun game. I deny both these claims.

[Granite26]

There's a difference between claiming that current economic theory is perfect and claimin that supply and demand isn't accurate.  At the macro level it is.  Specific details? well, that's programmable.  Coming out against S\D is literally saying 'People won't pay less for things they've already got enough of, and the more of something there is, the less competition there is to get it'.  It's a part of modern theory, not the whole.

Ultra detailed... I'm not sure about.  I think that if the economic conditions were presented to the player in a reasonable way it'd be fun.  If you don't want to min-max it, sure, just produce a little bit of everything and sell what they want when they get there.

I think what most people are asking for is the demand/price negotiation slider (that already exists) being tied to their own actions, rather than randomly generated.  You can run your fort however you want, but if you want to make money of the merchants, it should be work...