Print

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

[atomicoctobot]

=============
||"You feel uneasy"||
=============

...

Lawyer: Howdy!

Oh, lordy, I actually laughed aloud at that one.

[tfaal]

What would happen to the local meat economy if you sold the townspeople a dragon corpse?

[Dae]

What would happen to the local meat economy if you sold the townspeople a dragon corpse?

They would all die like the rest of the village before realizing that dragon meat is highly poisonous.

[Dante]

it became clear that the first transfer of goods we'll need is some food for the newly founded villages while they wait for their initial planting to grow

"It became clear", huh. Sounds like there were some early disasters here.
Urist McHuman: "Here we are, lads. This will be our new home, Pigletcloistered. Strike the earth!"
Urist McOtherHuman: "Yee-haw. I can't wait to harvest the first sweet sweet handful of prickle berries, especially since we didn't bring any supplies at all with us."
Urist McHuman: "..."
Two months later
Urist McSkeleton: "..."


If prices are generated entirely dynamically based on production and consumption, we could easily get absurd situations, maybe involving worthless diamond goblets and the highly-sought-after mule skin. Will there still be the equivalent of e.g. baseline material/item values in the raws?

[madjoe5]

If prices are generated entirely dynamically based on production and consumption, we could easily get absurd situations, maybe involving worthless diamond goblets and the highly-sought-after mule skin. Will there still be the equivalent of e.g. baseline material/item values in the raws?

Well if there is tons of diamond goblets, I would imagine that they do become worthless. Although I don't think things like leather and general stone will be treated that way. I assume that with sufficient amounts of, say  Horse and cat, leather; the prices for rare animal leathers won't skyrocket.

[Areyar]

I imagine prices will still be linked to hardcoded mean values.
They might have properties like volatility that govern how their price fluctuate under influence of supply and demand.
A base material that has many substitutes, like the aforementioned leather, probably has quite low volatility as demand can be met by the alternatives.

Still mandates or mandatelike economic events could artificially raise the price of specific types of stuff.

The price of a manufactured objects probably is more subject to the quality than the base materials used in its construction. . . I expect little or no changes to the current system that calculates their value.

[NO-GO]

... it became clear that the first transfer of goods we'll need is some food for the newly founded villages while they wait for their initial planting to grow

For anyone else, did this observation remind you of pre-Agricultural Revolution hunter-gatherer societies? Correct me if I am wrong but I imagine that the solution to preventing civs from starving and collapsing at the beginning of time would be to somehow have the settlements start out with initial stores of food to get them through to their very first harvest time, but I think it would be interesting to eventually see the various civilizations, as they settle after the creation of the world and wait to reap the products of their first harvest, attempt to make ends meet by having a high number of hunters/gatherers among the populace who travel into the wilderness either solo or in groups. Then, as time passes and the settlement becomes sustainable through farming, we see a number of these hunters switch from hunting to form the civilization's first military groups, and and some gatherers becoming farmers, and the rest branching off into various other occupations.

[monk12]

... it became clear that the first transfer of goods we'll need is some food for the newly founded villages while they wait for their initial planting to grow

For anyone else, did this observation remind you of pre-Agricultural Revolution hunter-gatherer societies? Correct me if I am wrong but I imagine that the solution to preventing civs from starving and collapsing at the beginning of time would be to somehow have the settlements start out with initial stores of food to get them through to their very first harvest time, but I think it would be interesting to eventually see the various civilizations, as they settle after the creation of the world and wait to reap the products of their first harvest, attempt to make ends meet by having a high number of hunters/gatherers among the populace who travel into the wilderness either solo or in groups. Then, as time passes and the settlement becomes sustainable through farming, we see a number of these hunters switch from hunting to form the civilization's first military groups, and and some gatherers becoming farmers, and the rest branching off into various other occupations.

Or better yet, mimic the movement of frontiersmen in American History. They move to the fringes and start up far away from society, and provide a base for society to build on in terms of food and security. They (or likeminded fellows in the next generation) then move away from the urban sprawl they dislike, and the process starts anew.

[Footkerchief]

If prices are generated entirely dynamically based on production and consumption, we could easily get absurd situations, maybe involving worthless diamond goblets and the highly-sought-after mule skin. Will there still be the equivalent of e.g. baseline material/item values in the raws?

This was answered a long time ago, although Toady probably has a clearer idea now (emphasis mine):

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=21498.msg356607;topicseen#msg356607

Speaking of which. Toady, PLEEESE add value tags for ALL materials and items! If you can't bother to do all items, do it for the weapons at least! Making new weapons balanced is such a PITA without the ability to alter their prices...

I'd prefer entity-specific value modifiers for materials and items.

There will be value tags for all of the materials this time around.  I'm probably not going to change the item raws, as the future of the value system is up in the Caravan Arc, which is finally (partially) on dev-next though that doesn't put it exactly close.  In general, the value will depending on all sorts of things like availability and usefulness and civ aesthetics (it's already been doing this last one for a while during trade, though it's still hard-coded based on some of the civ flags), and I doubt a [VALUE:#] will survive the process.  It'll probably be more like the army strength calculations for creatures (without the megabeast death part), where all of the little numbers come together to define the usefulness, and they are filtered through entity ethics-style stuff to attain aesthetic value, and then availability comes up during the world gen and in-play trade sim, though I haven't really thought too much about the specifics as it's quite a way off.

[Sowelu]

I'm guessing that material values will take a few hundred years to really settle out.  If you only gen fifty years, people won't know their platinum from their copper value-wise.

[LoSboccacc]

I guess you can make up relative metal presence from the raws tags and world layers, for a start, and then let the market adjust.

[G-Flex]

Regarding material value's subjectivity:

What about value that comes from factors that aren't yet implemented, either in entity definitions or material definitions? For instance, one particular reason people have cared much for gold traditionally is the fact that it's a noble metal, never really corroding, but that sort of thing isn't implemented yet. I guess the fact that it's interesting looking counts, but would be secondary. Simply analyzing entity and material definitions as they are now, wouldn't gold actually wind up being fairly valueless, as an example of the limitation of this sort of thing? It would still be rare, I guess, if it weren't for the abundance of minerals we have now.

[The Merchant Of Menace]

Regarding material value's subjectivity:

What about value that comes from factors that aren't yet implemented, either in entity definitions or material definitions? For instance, one particular reason people have cared much for gold traditionally is the fact that it's a noble metal, never really corroding, but that sort of thing isn't implemented yet. I guess the fact that it's interesting looking counts, but would be secondary. Simply analyzing entity and material definitions as they are now, wouldn't gold actually wind up being fairly valueless, as an example of the limitation of this sort of thing? It would still be rare, I guess, if it weren't for the abundance of minerals we have now.

I'm guessing the case will be that, if you saturate the market with gold it'll become valueless. But at the beginning other civs wouldn't have all that much access to gold.

[Lord Shonus]

Presumambly, the way to prevent this would be a prevalence of "likes gold" prefs to drive up demand.

[LoSboccacc]

well, considering that dwarves are the only civ digging up the stuff right now and they don't have a real use for gold it will be a scarce resource.