There will always be extremists on both the left and the right, but reality generally lies somewhere in the middle. I believe there is room in this game for the concept of public property, or community property, owned and operated from the coffers of the fort as a distinct entity from the dwarves. Currently the game is almost exclusively a communist, left-wing view that everything belongs to The People, save a few small private items. Even to the point of being too much so, begging for a little capitolist innovation.
Fine, as long as it (1) makes economic sense and (2) doesn't disconnect the player's controls.
1. There's no reason to have a fractional reserve banking system in a community of seven guys living in a hole in the ground. This goes to what Dante said about the economy needing to kick in at some point.
2. When I order a tunnel dug out somewhere, the dwarves damn well do it, and don't say "No, it would be more profitable for me to open a cheese shop." This isn't incompatible with the idea of a cash or credit economy. However, if there is some kind of free market economy, then the player needs the tools to exert precise control. To name a few:
- Dwarves should never do any of the following jobs without being explicitly told to: Mining of any kind; construction of any kind; link mechanisms; pull levers. They should also never place or remove workshops, doors, floodgates, or traps except in their personal rooms.
- Forbid designations must be respected. If the player forbids a dwarf's personal property, the dwarf can't refuse. He might be automatically compensated in fortress credit, though.
- Only the player can designate rooms, and dwarves can't own or rent areas that aren't designated as rooms. This may require more kinds of rooms to exist, such as a "garden" where dwarves can build private farm plots.
- Labor settings need to be respected somehow. Maybe labor settings apply to fortress-ordered work, and dwarves do private work in their free time which may fall outside their labor settings.
Come to think of it, this could be a good way to have the economy incrementally switch on: As the fortress matures, the percentage of dwarf-hours needed to keep it running naturally decreases, and dwarves will fill in some of their free time with personal projects (crafts, improving their space, or trading) in addition to socializing the way they do now. So unless you're building a megaproject, training a huge militia, or suffering a labor shortage for some reason, your dwarves will eventually start making things to sell to each other or to caravans. They will build skill doing this, and will tend to do it in areas that use their existing skills, so you could sort of shape the private sector economy by training dwarves in skills you want to see.
This might put the player in the Fun position of having enough dwarves, but being too low on resources to pay them for any work. Here again, the government makes a promise for future delivery of goods, in the form of promisary coin. The idea being that in better times, the dwarves can come and trade those coins in to the Treasurer for meals, crops, or metals that they might want for their personal use.
This is the old economy system, going back to the 2d version: dwarves are paid in fortress credit, which they use to buy their stuff. There were some problems with the implementation (notably the fixed price structure for rent) but as an economic model it was a good fit for a small isolated outpost.
Then we have a system with at least two forms of currency, the food coins from the farmer, and the unspecified coins from the treasury. The treasury coins need more clarity, so let's say they trade for a bar of metal, as chosen by the player when he mints them.
I think you're getting your wires crossed here. First, the point of having a banker (someone who creates money for the community) is to avoid having Farmer Fikod write his own credit, which is then of questionable value. Instead, at the start of the season, Farmer Fikod writes a hundred plump helmet IOUs to Baron Bomrek in exchange for coin (or paper money or a letter of credit or whatever) to pay his expenses for the year, and then at harvest gives a hundred plump helmets to the Baron, who sells them back to the community.
Second, I'm not sure I see the point of coins backed by bars of metal. A coin
is a bar of metal. The coins, in this case, are backed by the entire fortress economy.
The player is free to mint way more coins than there is metal to trade, which brings up more opportunities for Fun. If a dwarf goes to cash one in when there's no metal to back it up, what happens? "Come back later" can get old, and so it should probably cause an unhappy thought. So if the player chooses to set up unbacked coin, and not bother to back it up later, then the citizens could experience a lot of bad thoughts as they attempt to trade their money in for metal. They might even be less inclined to accept government coin while they are experiencing a bad thought from unbacked currency.
Why are all these citizens trying to trade their fortress coins in for metal bars? What they should be doing, if they have a surplus, is trading in for luxury goods, better rooms, materials for crafting, and so on. If
none of that stuff is available, then they should start getting angry over being underpaid for their work.
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Topic: Abundance of Resources, Metalworking, Improved Economy, and Caravans (Read 22995 times)