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Yes, too much value is gained from spoils of war.  There should be more emphasis on crafting your own goods.

123 (65.4%)

Yes, but it's unbalanced on purpose so that you can worry about more important things if you choose.  It's a design decision.

37 (19.7%)

No, the trade system feels balanced just fine as it is.

24 (12.8%)

No, in fact they aren't valuable enough, and I feel like I should earn more for fending off intruders!

4 (2.1%)

Total Members Voted: 188

Voting closed: December 08, 2009, 10:03:30 pm

[InsanityPrelude]

The goblins and their GCS silk are my major trade material. I wouldn't mind seeing them at least not drop GCS items so often, so my craftsdwarves actually have something to do.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Yes its worth too much, both because of a lack of damage/degradation in battle or the mere fact its goblin stuff (not really know for it's quality).  But also because goblins just have way too many GCS silk items, what are goblins doing waring fine silk socks???

And for thous talking about Spoils of war and all that.  The looting of corpses IS NOT what is historically referred to by spoils of war, spoils mean things like looting a castles/cities/nations treasury or taking the land itself.  Its what the Invaders get when they break in and destroy your fort.  Provisioning and arming and army is indeed expensive but very little if any of that value can be return by looting the corpses, in DF it approaches 100%.

[Lyrax]

Looting corpses, historically, was a fine way of obtaining arms and armor.

The clothes of the dead were generally worthless/unsanitary/unclean/untouchable and therefore were left on their former owners.  If goblins came into battle stark naked (except for armor) I wouldn't mind.

[Shade-o]

Perhaps Leather and Cloth based items could be stripped down like Metal items are. So by processing a pile of Narrow Pig Tail Socks, you get a bolt's worth of regular, raw Pig Tail Cloth. A problem there is that there is a massive variety of Leather types, while there is only a couple of Cloths and Metals you would find. Finding enough Sea Lamprey Leather items to create a new piece of Leather could take a long time indeed.

Maybe the leather could simply be assigned whatever was most dominant during the processing, causing 3 Mountain Goat and 7 Giant Toad items to make a Giant Toad piece. If no dominant is present, like 2-4-4, it randomly picks from the highest.

Also, perhaps a plain 'Burner' furnace building could be made. With a new Designation command, perhaps, or just redirecting the Dump designation, it would be a big ol' fire-pit which items get tossed into. Fireproof items like metal and rocks would ignore the Burner, heading to the chasm. It could be powered by charcoal, or magma.

I suppose it would basically be a sanctioned magma dumping hole that only allows burnables.

Edit:

Actually, it could be used even more efficiently than that. If corpses act like containers, then a single hauler could take the goblin body into the burner, throw it in, fire it up. All that remains would be the bones, skull, and anything made of metal or stone.

[Lightning4]

It's a bit unbalanced, but you can choose to ignore it if you wish. If you want to shell out goblin clothes by the cartful, go right ahead. Or, you can simply dump them in a magma vent and never see them again and choose to use your own production for trade.

Although once it (inevitably) gets nerfed, I'd like to see some kind of cloth recycling. Tearing up all that goblin clothing and patching it back together for low quality cloth goods. Or bandages.
It'll probably be nerfed whenever traders have basic scaling demands. Drowning them in goblin crap will just make them want it less until finally you can't even unload a dwarfton of the stuff for a -shad bone earring-.

[zwei]

Yes, it is imbalanced. And quite ridiculous, frankly.

Once ambushes start happening, you can buy pretty much everything you would ever need by trading clothes and still end up with extras.

And several year later, you end up buying several stacks of masterpiece crafted, masterpiece decorated steel bolts because they are only 7500 dwarfbucks per stack. And end up buyng bons of leather/cloth just for heck of it.

And not mentioning that loot hauling is annoying as it is ~10 items per corpse.

---

Guess some simple stuff is required:

 * Decrease all looted item costs everelly - i.e. by order of magnitude (10* items to 1*, 600* items to 60*)

 * Make looted clothes apropriatelly damaged (holes and rips, blood & vomit & mud stains) and require them to be cleaned (requires bar of soap, better quality soap to get more stains off them at same time), and mended (tailoring or leatherworking task, consumes a bit of thread) before they will be accepted by caravan. This would basically require setting up whole alchemy/tailoring industry for player, or buy a lot of soap. In any case, it would reduce gains significantly.

 * Add reaction to wood furnance to burn cloth/leather items to create ash

 * Reproccessing of some items to plain cloth/leather, aking to smelting goblin ore. Or adjusting them to normal size.

 * Make loot cloth health hazard and uhappy though generator (blood/vomit/dirt/water combination is quite a breeding ground for diseases, fungi and heaven for vermin like mice/rats/FLEAS/BEDBUGS, and considering general goblin/kobbold hygiene, some small amount of miasma would be apropriate too.).

"Urist Mc Dwarf was feeling miserable recently. He suffered fleabites recently, He slept in bed-bug infested bed recendly, he was disgusted by miasma emmitted by narrow sock recently. He was disgunsted by mouldy small shirt recently."

It would make one rethink hauling all those items inside fortress. Do i really want my dwarves to sleep and live near heap of ex-globlin clothes? What about doing something sanitary ... like burning it.

Also, task of de-fleaing fortress sounds like fun ^^.

[Barrel Roll]

Yeah, it is a bit irritating. I expect it's one of those things that'll get fixed in the Eventually Arc. Maybe there will even be some use for old rags, or you'll be able to quickly and easily haul all the goblins and their stuff away into a mass grave and forget about them. In the Lord of the Rings, the standrad goblin disposal procedure was to drag them all into a pile and burn them. And items left lying on the ground definitely should degrade over time, depending on material.

I like this idea. After taking all the armor to be melted you can [d]esignate all the random socks and leather crap to be burned.

[tombthedwarf]

To the victor go the spoils,

you should make a fair bit of money selling off your defeated enemies accoutrement, though the incredible value of some items (I'm looking at you: (narrow giant cave spider silk loincloth)) makes the gains quite unreasonable for the enemies you are murdering, because it can be thought that the giant cave spider silk is the attire if nobles; so you don't expect bands of goblin cut-throats roaming the countryside in "clean", new finery.

[Neonivek]

There are several problems with the loot that I shall highlight

1) Damage and Worn Status: Armor, clothes, weapons, and goods don't retain possible damage or any sort of worn status as it is. Blood should ruin Iron Armor and stain any sort of clothing being used. Plus even your own goods don't exactly wear out.
2) Invaluable Goods on Mass: Giant Cave Spider Silk in bulk?
3) Sale doesn't reflect need: While there should be collectors, as a whole selling useless peices of clothing and armor shouldn't be nearly as lucrative.
4) Inflation of Armor and Quality: The game unfortunately plays a game of SUPER INFLATION! Platemail for example sells for quite a bit and quality can raise the price even more, plus high quality goods arn't even particularly rare and can be churned out quite a bit. This is a problem with the game as a whole.
5) 100% collection: While collecting some goods have been known, Dwarf Fortress seems to be a world where people loot absolutely everything off a corpse and, freekishly enough, use it. There should be reasonable limits, honestly let them rot with their socks on!
6) You have it we buy it!: Merchants will buy anything you sell them at any bulk you sell them. Merchants also seem to be willing to work at a deficit.
7) Let no good be left behind: Alright so your own dwarf has died. What should we do about his stuff? Well lets give it all away! No don't send it to his family in the next town, No don't bury him with his mace, No especially don't eat his pet. We reuse EVERYTHING!
Suicide be us: Armies effectively are commiting suicide when they attack. It is the equivilant of them standing outside your fortress and slitting their throats. Sieges are a very uncostly to repel.
9) We are evil and thus wasteful: On the same side the sieges don't take any of their goods back with them. It isn't a bad strategy to loot the battlefield before you go.
10) We have no needs: So you produce a lot of goods, what do your dwarves want? Next to nothing? alright then. If Dwarves had more of an ability to take goods for themselves. (For example Soldiers often looted the battlefield and kept what they got... Why the heck does the Fortress get to keep it?) then it would limit what the player has to use himself.

Uhh there is probably more but I feel like 10 is enough for now.

[KenboCalrissian]

I like zwei's recommendations a lot.  I could see this being pretty fun, and if it's too much work you still have the option of dropping it into a chasm.

[Qmarx]

Honestly, it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue if gobbos
A) only had historically accurate casualty rates (like 20% for an absolutely horrific slaughter)
B) Took their spoils with them if reasonably possible
C) Inflicted roughly equal damage to your dorfs
CB) And took your dorfs equipment
D) Didn't wear GCS cloth.

[dragon0421]

Removing GCS from loot lists would fix 90% of the problem relatively easily.

The last 10% would be fixed if blood stained, vomit covered, combat torn, clothing was completely worthless (and could potentially give more functionality to clothiers and soap makers).

[Skorpion]

Yes, it's entirely broken. I've taken a step against it in my current fort, and started just summarily designating all goblin clothing to be thrown into the magma moat.

Once corpse-as-container haulage comes into use, I'll be just tossing goblins into a mass grave, removing the skulls and bones once they rot out, and then just magma-ing the lot to extract the recyclable iron.

[Neonivek]

I don't even like the choices for this poll... None of them reflect my answer or Skorpions

[Footkerchief]

This might be fixed a bit in the next version, what with weapons being able to break and armors subject to degradation.

Combat degradation of weapons and armor isn't going in for the upcoming version.  As can be seen in the List (under Wounds/Combat), it got put off until later releases.