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[Iapetus]

I've been thinking of ways to improve the economy, and came up with an interesting suggestion involving guilds that purchase items and pay the dwarves. 

There would be several guilds that come into existance when the economy starts, one associated with each of the main rescource gathering tasks and each group of craft jobs.  Each guild would have its own bank account with which to buy items and pay workers.

Step 1: gathering raw materials.
When raw materials are first produced, they become property of the associated guild, who pays the resource gatherer for their work.  For example, when a miner digs out a lump of rock, that rock becomes property of the Miners' Guild.  The Miners' Guild pays the miner for each rock/ore/gem/etc they dig out the ground, either a fixed rate, or variable depending on the value of the rock etc.

Step 2: hauling items
Whenever a hauler moves an item to a stockpile, the guild that owns the item pays the hauler for their work.  This would avoid (or at least reduce) the exploit of continuously hauling items from pile to pile to generate money.  If the guild cannot pay the hauler, the item becomes the property of the hauler, but is flagged as "for sale", so anyone that wants it can buy it from the hauler.

Step 3: crafting items
Whenever a craft dwarf (or any other manufacturing profession) wants to make something, they collect the items they need, and the guild associated with that job buys the materials from the guild that currently owns them (e.g. when a stone crafter picks up a rock to make a rock craft, the Craftdwarves' Guild purchases the rock from the Miners' Guild).  The finished product becomes the property of the appropriate guild (in this case the Jewlers' Guild), who pays the manufacturer for their work.

Step 4: using/selling items
Shopkeepers will buy their stock from the guild that owns it.
When furniture is used to make a room, it remains the property of the guild that produced it.  If/when the room owner pays their rent, the proportion of the rent that is due to the value of the furniture goes to the guild that owns it.

Step 5: public works
Some jobs aren't appropriate for this system, as they don't involve any goods changing hands or value being added to materials.  For example pump operating, lever pulling, soldiering, etc.  These should be treated as "public works", and payed for by the state, using the money gathered in taxes.  (Finally - an actual use for the tax collector).



I can see some potential problems with this, for example if a guild somehow runs out of funds it won't be able to buy any materials or pay the workers.  Possible solutions would be to allow workers to buy items privately if their guild cannot pay for them (their produce then becomes their own property rather than that of the guild, and they benefit directly from the sale).  Alternatively dwarves could steal items they need (allowing them to keep working, but at the risk of punishment).  Or state funds could be used to bail out bankrupt guilds (either automatically, or through player involvement, or a combination of both).

I'm also not sure how trading would be handled under this system.


What are your thoughts on this idea?  Is it workable?  Would it be interesting or fun (or "Fun")?  Can you think of any improvements?

[Pilsu]

Due to the very nature of the game I think community ownership of materials and items are unavoidable. This would just break the game further methinks

[Grendus]

The hard part with having the dwarves work on a capitalist system is you end up with dwarves who aren't skilled trying to do skilled labor. Urist McPotash Maker has no business trying to forge Platinum goblets, that's for Urist McMetalcrafter. If you have a capitalist economy with communist work you end up stressing an already stressed economy as either the state won't have the money to pay the dwarf, the state won't have work for the dwarf to do (the current problem), or the dwarf won't want to work because he's already made so much money.

Modern capitalism works because it relies on human intelligence. When that intelligence fails, such as with the collapse of the inflated housing market, bad things happen. Dwarves are downright stupid, they paint themselves into a corner every time. The last thing we need is a soap maker deciding he wants to be a clothier and using all the GCS silk (which you were saving for a mood) to produce base quality silk thongs.

I've thought about the economy in DF for a while, and I can see no alternative. DF may be one of those rare instances where a communist society will work - the player has vested interest in keeping (most of) his dwarves healthy, has no desire to amass personal wealth, he cannot be rebelled against... it's China's wet dream.

[Granite26]

The hard part with having the dwarves work on a capitalist system is you end up with dwarves who aren't skilled trying to do skilled labor. Urist McPotash Maker has no business trying to forge Platinum goblets, that's for Urist McMetalcrafter.

Capitalism stops the Potashmaker from trying to make platinum crafts by making platinum expensive and factoring in an oportunity cost.

I.E. if the Potash maker buys a platinum bar (his input) and fuel, and makes a crappy goblet, the goblet won't be worth more than the value of the materials you'd get melting it down(currently 1/10th the input), and he wasted the money on fuel.

Doesn't take much intelligence on a dwarf's part to estimate the return for that action (My skill is this, likely to produce that, output - input is negative, crap...)

That makes it possible to balance forging, say, copper items as low enough cost to be something FUN for a dwarf to do, and when he gets skilled enough, it's quickly profitable.

Capitalism even handles dividing the weakly skilled platinum crafter from the strongly skilled.  If there isn't enough Platinum to go around, the strongly skilled crafter will bids up the price towards his expected profit, until the weakly skilled crafter is priced out of HIS expected profit.

[Atarlost]

The advantage of capitalism in the real world is that it takes advantage of everybody's intelligence.  The disadvantage of capitalism in DF, apart from creating chaos if it doesn't work and leaving the player with little to do if it does work, is that it requires every dwarf to calculate opportunity costs every time he completes a task.  That's one calculation per dwarf per possible task.  There are a lot of possible tasks in DF and a lot of people's computers are allready straining to handle heat and fluid flow and pathing. 

Hauling jobs are particularly bad because the time they take is dependant on the path which requires running the pathfinding algorithm.  Every time any dwarf needs to decide on a task the computer would need to basically simulate every possible hauling job as well as the pathing for every possible piece of material that can be used for every possible job. 

To simulate capitalism properly you don't just need to be multithreaded, you need to be massively parallel. 

[Granite26]

Good point, at least about the hauling.  It wouldn't take to long for normal jobs if you had a simple formula where you entered a base stat and got the result back...  (SKILL * X - (FixedCost)) would be O(n).  Hopefully, long term, you're going to sort jobs by AI anyway, which means calcing all the fitness values (based on dwarf position, etc) so the skill calc is a negligible part of that.  (Otherwise, we keep the dwarf pops a job off the stack  model we've got now)

[Iapetus]

The hard part with having the dwarves work on a capitalist system is you end up with dwarves who aren't skilled trying to do skilled labor.  Urist McPotash Maker has no business trying to forge Platinum goblets, that's for Urist McMetalcrafter.  If you have a capitalist economy with communist work you end up stressing an already stressed economy as either the state won't have the money to pay the dwarf, the state won't have work for the dwarf to do (the current problem), or the dwarf won't want to work because he's already made so much money...  The last thing we need is a soap maker deciding he wants to be a clothier and using all the GCS silk (which you were saving for a mood) to produce base quality silk thongs.

That shouldn't be an issue.  I wasn't intending to make any changes to how jobs were assingned, just how resources were owned and workers were paid (or rather, who paid them).

(I think I see the source of confusion: when I said "Whenever a craft dwarf (or any other manufacturing profession) wants to make something" I meant "when a dwarf gets assigned a job a goes to collect the necessary materials".  I wasn't suggesting that dwarves would choose their own jobs based on random whims / personal preferences.

Goblets would still be made by the dwarves with the metal crafting job.  If you wanted to train up a potash maker as a metal crafter then (assuming you wanted to make the best use of materials) you would make goblets from a cheap metal at a workshop restricted to low-skilled dwarves, and platinum goblets at a workshop limited to highly-skilled dwarves, just as you would now.


I'm also not sure that my suggestion is really capitalist - I was thinking of something more along the lines of a medieval guild-based or mercantile system.  (Although I suppose the guilds are essentially corporations by another name, so maybe it is appropriate).

An earlier idea had been to make a genuine free-market capitalist economy, where evey item was privatly owned (rocks belonging to the dwarf that mined them, haulers buying them from the miner, craft dwarves buying them from the hauler, shopkeepers buying finished goods from the craft dwarf, etc), but realised that this could easily become a nightmare of epic proportions, for the reasons already outlined, with the potential for complete economic collapse if e.g. people couldn't afford the materials they needed.

That's why I came up with the guild idea, so that everyone apart from the end consumer could essentially pool their purchasing power.

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[jseah]

OP: Very good idea!  This can be used together with the previous thread on economics. 

Instead of juggling micro-economics, you can abstract it into macro-economics (sort of) using this system.  Which makes processing power take so much less. 

Each guild has their own job stack, divided into each type of job.  All the "make platinum goblets" go into one stack, "tin goblets" go into another, "steel armour" into yet another. 

The rest follows your idea, except:
The guild calculates the payout for each job individually and posts an "average" payout at the top of the stack.  The dwarves only check those when determining how much the job pays. 

And that the guilds don't do the buying/selling of goods.  The dwarves do it themselves, the guild just sets the prices and tracks stuff.  Much like how a stock brokerage works in the stock market. 

As for the hauling problem, use an average.  Make hauling have it's own "guild" and have it pay workers depending on the time taken to complete the job.  Track how much workers were paid per job and use a time average.  The workers use that "average" payout to calculate utility. 
 - I know it can be cheated by simply taking longer to do the job.  But dwarves aren't smart enough to do that.  (or maybe they can be, and make it a fine-able offence XD)

Workers should only check with the guild they are attached to for jobs, and only change guilds if they fail to earn enough money. 

Player interaction comes in where the player can subsidize certain actions (ie. flat increase to payout of certain jobs, limited by job quantity or money limit) or request X amount of goods.  Simply assume the government can print money and get away with it.  Inflation will balance itself out. 

[Ghoulz]

The player's interaction would be relegated to maintaining the army and doing irresponsible things (i.e. raising the taxes and using the money to pay workers to build a giant statue of the leader, or build him a giant water park using screw pumps).

Unless the game would allow you to take control of a citizen once the fortress' system becomes very self sustaining, allowing you to experience the day to day life and try to make it big in a fortress that you created (essentially a fantasy version of The Sims). Unfortunately this could all get in the way of maintaining a proper military, and it would be too much for the game to maintain your army in addition to everything else.

[Granite26]

The player's interaction would be relegated to maintaining the army and doing irresponsible things (i.e. raising the taxes and using the money to pay workers to build a giant statue of the leader, or build him a giant water park using screw pumps).

Unless the game would allow you to take control of a citizen once the fortress' system becomes very self sustaining, allowing you to experience the day to day life and try to make it big in a fortress that you created (essentially a fantasy version of The Sims). Unfortunately this could all get in the way of maintaining a proper military, and it would be too much for the game to maintain your army in addition to everything else.

1: I think government orders would be maintained...

2: It had better be able to maintain the military, and everything else, for when you're visiting cities in adventure mode

[Ghoulz]

I'm not talking about whether or not its possible with the current system, I'm talking about whether or not its game-ruining.

[jseah]

Auto-allocation doesn't mean the player has nothing to do. 

Dwarves get into all sorts of trouble by themselves and it's your job to rescue them.  XD  sort of.  There's also things like one sector producing too much or you'd really like to see that masterwork adamantine armour made.  Correcting imbalances and managing the economy will still be needed.  Just with not so much micro-management. 

[Granite26]

I'm not talking about whether or not its possible with the current system, I'm talking about whether or not its game-ruining.

I don't think capitalism would be self regulating.  The rule of thumb I've seen elsewhere is that you lose a lot of the finer controls and are forced to apply a VERY light touch with what you've got, or you send everything out of whack.

I.E. Real world economy, the government has control over interest rates, taxes, and money supply and that's about it.

I like to think of it as a boat... As the boats at dock, you've got all sorts of ropes and ties, and a lot of control over it, but you've got to pay attention to all of them.  Take the boat out to sea, and all you've got is a rudder, but the whole staying afloat thing takes care of itself.

Not saying that applies directly to DF of course... DF version is more like 'You have fewer things to worry about, but if you mess them up, the consequences are worse'