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[Footkerchief]

Will we be able to get roads made on the world map, in both dwarf and adventure mode?

Toady touched on roads and tunnels recently:

Are dwarf civ fortresses going to connect up to both underground roads and overground roads? Will they access the cave systems, maybe with guards posted, or even farm in them?

I'm hoping I can handle that when it comes up, yeah.  There used to be crappy tunnel connections and there are still crappy roads, and those will be revisited at some point.

[Mephansteras]

Will trading a material to a civ give them limited access to that material in the same manner that it currently does for the player? For example, Vanilla Elves don't use metal. If I traded away large amounts of coke and steel bars to the elves, would they later show up with low quality steel equipment made from those bars? Similarly, will resource deposits become more important in worldgen, for example humans fighting elves to gain a tin deposit (once tin is properly rare again)?

What they do with traded materials or whether they trade for them in the first place in world gen will likely depending on the professions given to them in their entity defs.  Resource deposits and redistribution to localized areas are going to be key, and struggles over resources are one of the main reasons the caravan stuff is going in before the next push on army stuff.  So it's quite possible that elves simply won't trade for steel, unless they can think ahead far enough to trade it to the humans or other dwarves, which may or may not be in the cards depending on how well things go -- once they see that they should accept steel in some circumstances, the rest would happen naturally, but the bump to get over is their valuation of steel during the initial trade, since it'll have to account for transport cost/storage/likelihood/value of the future trade.  That's probably easier during dwarf mode rather than world gen, just because there is more time to crunch fewer numbers.  Since humans don't have a restriction on making things from steel if they've got the bars at this point, that is more straightforward -- if you trade steel bars to humans, as things are currently planned, they will return with steel weapons in the event of an attack (provided the armies draw equipment from stockpiles next time, which I addressed around the last post I think).

Are Elves going to have any preference/dislike for trading for metal? They can't really tell if it was made using charcoal or coke, and it's generally superior to what they can do natively, so could that be something effected by the ruler's preferences?

Also, will we eventually see other civs trying to trade for your metalworking secrets? A human king offering an alliance in exchange for you teaching some human smiths how to make steel, for example?

[Areyar]

10 Barnards Star -> sell luxury goods -> Buy Robots -> travel to Sol -> check bulletin board - > sell robots -> buy luxury goods -> travel to Barnards Star
20 GOTO 10

You got more money shipping between Gateway and Soholia.

I love this community. Right on commanders!

[MrWiggles]

Will we be able to get roads made on the world map, in both dwarf and adventure mode?

Toady touched on roads and tunnels recently:

Are dwarf civ fortresses going to connect up to both underground roads and overground roads? Will they access the cave systems, maybe with guards posted, or even farm in them?

I'm hoping I can handle that when it comes up, yeah.  There used to be crappy tunnel connections and there are still crappy roads, and those will be revisited at some point.

Though related, they are different issues.

[Sowelu]

Also, I know it is a crazy question, but when you calculate distance for things like caravan travel, will you use spherical-world distance, or straight line distance? Will dragons prefer raiding along great-circle routes?

Considering that a region is not an entire planet, and may in fact be a very SMALL chunk of a planet (I like to think of medium-sized islands as being the UK), I can't imagine that this would be an issue yet.

[Neonivek]

Thanks again Toady for answering our questions.

[PTTG??]

Assuming that a tile is 2.5 feet on edge, then a large world is approxamately 100 miles in each direction. At that scale, map projection issues are not significant.

Road network pathing will be interesting to see.

[G-Flex]

Assuming that a tile is 2.5 feet on edge

2.5 feet? That's an extremely low estimate, especially since it's generally assumed in the game that they're cubic, and 2.5 feet isn't a hell of a lot of room for standing, or to place furniture with walking room around it. I think they've got to be a couple meters across or so.

[Quatch]

Assuming that a tile is 2.5 feet on edge, then a large world is approxamately 100 miles in each direction. At that scale, map projection issues are not significant.

Road network pathing will be interesting to see.

We've heard estimates of up to 3m, and Toady mentioned 2m in a DF talk, as I recall. Using that, it'd be 240 miles; converted to degrees (at 45N) would be 3.5 degrees, which is less than the 6 degrees wide UTM map sheets (which don't line up because of distortion). So I suppose you're still right here

However, 390km is still a pretty small place. I can imagine DF getting a little bit larger in scope in the future.

But hey, Toady's a bit of a math geek, so he might have done something like this already. I'm curious

On the subject of maps and exploration, When we get to explore a region revealing the map as we go, will there ever be a chance of mapping error leading to strange maps? Like the original maps of north america had the shape of the continent far too wide at the top because it hadn't been circumnavigated or surveyed straight across. Small errors propagate.

[Jiri Petru]

On the subject of maps and exploration, When we get to explore a region revealing the map as we go, will there ever be a chance of mapping error leading to strange maps? Like the original maps of north america had the shape of the continent far too wide at the top because it hadn't been circumnavigated or surveyed straight across. Small errors propagate.

I'm afraid this would be simply too confusing. The original mappers of North America still had the real landscape in front of their eyes and could refer to it, perhaps even notice the map doesn't fit. The player, on the other hand, has no such point of reference. The map is their eyes.

[1freeman]

Thank you for answering my questions Toady, now i have another one for you...

When adventurer's are able to purchase livestock/pet's, will the animals be inherently loyal to you or will they be able to wander off if you don't fence them in and/or keep an eye on them, and if they aren't instantly loyal will there be a skill/attribute that determines how well your character can handle animal's. also will they follow like companions do or will we have to hold/lead them around?

[Sowelu]

On the subject of maps and exploration, When we get to explore a region revealing the map as we go, will there ever be a chance of mapping error leading to strange maps? Like the original maps of north america had the shape of the continent far too wide at the top because it hadn't been circumnavigated or surveyed straight across. Small errors propagate.

I'm afraid this would be simply too confusing. The original mappers of North America still had the real landscape in front of their eyes and could refer to it, perhaps even notice the map doesn't fit. The player, on the other hand, has no such point of reference. The map is their eyes.

The old Microprose game "Machiavelli the Prince" started you out with an inaccurate map, which you then filled in correctly as you explored.  So some of the islands were a little bit off, some of the terrain was wrong, landmasses tilted a slightly different direction, maybe a city a little further away--or maybe a city that wasn't on the original map at all!

I think it would be neat to buy maps in this, which may be inaccurate.

[Karlito]

...
Your equipment is complete, you shove all your military items into the Abstractor Logistics Chest where they get remembered as "300 Exceptional Steel Axes", "300 Superior Steel Chainmails", "300 Finely-crafted Bronze High Boots" and so on. Again, decorations are forgotten or maybe they'll be kept in some abstracted way like 'they are all decorated with goblin bone' and the game will decide whether that means spikes, hanging rings or an image when the player asks to look closely at the item again.
...

Just wanted to say I really like your ideas and hope the game ends up looking something like that, but is this kind of abstraction necessary? I thought one of the goals of the caravan arc was to track individual items after they exit your fortress. (Or is that still the case? I haven't been paying attention as much in recent months. Footkerchief?)

[JohnieRWilkins]

Since the various civs use different coins, how will the exchange rate work? Won't mining out a gold vein and turning it to coin completely ruin world trade? If the value of a precious metal or any otherwise stable, in-demand commodity suddenly drops on the market, that would cause a crash across the board in the real world. How do you envision this working in DF? Will the civs invent fiat currency to overcome this crippling instability? I'm sure that the human traders wouldn't like having their economy rest on the competence and whims of the mining dwarves.

---

Are you planning on adding any cool economics screens for legends mode that show the basic GDP of each civ, in commodities produced, (I guess GDP is an inaccurate term since the value of services would be too hard to track) or maybe even the value of all goods produced in relation to the value of their coin? (I'll have like 50 nerdgasms in a row if you answer yes, so don't disappoint me. )

---

Will this game ever have any banks?

--- end questions ---

The trading arc has so much more potential than just being a silly excuse to fly spacetrucks around, buying low and selling high. I think that this would be something that's nearly impossible to model right, but who the crud wouldn't want to play the speculation game based around political instability, dwarven ore mining, and harvest weather predictions inside of DF? Maybe an honest merchant won't pay the goblins off to ambush the elven food caravans this year, flooding the market with cheap food?

[MrWiggles]

Since the various civs use different coins, how will the exchange rate work? Won't mining out a gold vein and turning it to coin completely ruin world trade? If the value of a precious metal or any otherwise stable, in-demand commodity suddenly drops on the market, that would cause a crash across the board in the real world. How do you envision this working in DF? Will the civs invent fiat currency to overcome this crippling instability?

This was a major concern when the world was on the Gold Standard, and there is also the hoarding goods to create artificial market demand and raise the value of the good. From my understanding, this was favorable when mercantilism was the active economic model. It still is a major hurtle with proponents wanting to go back the gold standard, and it doesnt have, in my opinion, solutions which make more favorable then the fait system.

Though DF populations numbers will probably never be near contemporary population counters, so some of the issues with mercantilism and the gold standard won't be as expressed.