I posted a little in
this thread about jobs and the economy. Perhaps relevant (though more about labour). This is the post (thread was about a job billboard feature or something):
I think something like this would be a good idea. As it is, the level of micromanagement required to run the fortress decreases pretty smoothly as your population expands, as it should. It's like zooming out from The Sims level to maybe Pharaoh or Caesar level. But it doesn't go far enough.
One of the things that does really bug me mid/late game is labour assignments. We shouldn't have to download third party programs just to manage who does what in the fortress. It gets tedious when you have around 80+ people, especially if their primary skill (their icon) is different from what you have them assigned to.
So I suggest a similar process to the noticeboard: once you get a guild, jobs from that profession become privatised. You designate them to be done, and then the guild (if they have a guild office designated or something) employs someone to do them for you, probably someone with high skill.
Maybe this ties in with the dwarven economy when it returns; instead of being assigned labours, everyone becomes available for employment in any field. When there are lots of one profession's jobs to do, lots of dwarfs have opportunity for employment in that field. Maybe you don't have enough skilled workers to fill them all, so base salaries increase with demand. If you have hardly any jobs queued up from a profession, then all but the highest skilled get laid off and have to look elsewhere, maybe becoming haulers, maybe getting jobs filling in vacancies in a trade with lots of job openings (but getting paid less because they'd be Dabbling).
Maybe each guild should charge interested dwarfs a bit of cash in return for some basic training in that trade.
Then your large fortress always has exactly as many workers in each trade as required, without you having to micromanage each dwarf's labours. Provided you have the population to supply all the work, of course. The manager should give you an idea of the unemployment rate too.
Obviously the player should get to dictate a minimum skill level for guilds to hire, again through the manager. And just to give completeness, the option to manually change labours on a dwarf has to stay in as well.
I think something like this would make managing larger fortresses much more bearable and fun. Time freed up to focus on ruling, not on frankly tedious labour micromanagement.
Some earlier posts talked about dwarfs dabbling in their spare time in other trades and producing their own goods independently, which is partly related to that ^. And this:
The economy could start with: at the trade depot, you are free to toggle "Dwarfs can barter/dwarfs can't barter" wherein an idle Dwarf can independently go up and trade their own belongings for caravan goods. Different caravan levels would be good for this, like a traveling tinker who sells rubbish trinkets right up to a full wagon train under steel plate guard trading exotic luxuries. This level of personal economic interaction can occur right from the getgo. At this level your fort is still an 'expedition', like an exploratory mining camp (or whatever motivation you happen to have) and the current communal activity is maintained.
Then, when you achieve a mayor, next phase: they request/require the establishment of the bureaucracy if not already set up. The fortress is now in 'company-owned mining town' phase and all property belongs to the 'expedition' entity (bar what currently belongs to individuals, such as clothes and room contents etc). Each dwarf gets company credit from doing jobs to spend as they like on food and other consumables. Flat rate on everything? Dwarfs who are unhappy/poor from no scheduled jobs must make a meeting appointment as currently happens. Nobody is getting rich, but hey, they're here to work. No physical coin present yet.
Next phase: from barony+. What happens here? The 'fortress' entity takes on less and less of a direct ownership of property and more of an administrative role. We can have a 'patchy' development here as guilds are established (requiring large fortresses to be able to attain most, if not all, of the guilds). Like the above spoilered comment, each guild hires its workers independently.
- Admin manager manages work orders. Order goes out from admin to guild.
- Guild buys material from other guilds or fortress admin. Job is done, guild pays worker the going rate (see spoiler above) from its own coffers. Workers without representative guild paid from fortress admin.
- Finished product belongs to guild, unless we're talking walls or other masonry, or the dwarf is privately contracted (no guild). Then the project has been paid for from admin coffers and belongs to the fortress admin. Bear with me on that one.
- Guild onsells finished product. Can be to other guild seeking products, or any cashed up dwarf looking for pimpin' stuff.
- Worker dwarf now spends his money buying food and other consumables, or saving if they're thrifty. i.e, food money does not go to farmers, but into the farmers' guild's coffers, or the fortress coffers if there is no guild (state-run industry; horrible, I know, but probably the easiest way).
- Admin coffers replenished by tax/rent combination, as well as from selling fortress admin-owned goods.
- TRADING UNDER THIS SYSTEM: Some ways:
1. Dwarf-by-dwarf personal commerce. Both bartering and money transactions allowed. Unrelated to you. You don't even have to care about it.
2. When a random trade caravan arrives, your broker is given a decent-sized loan of coin. You then have a look at what the traders are offering, and mark what you want to trade for. Your broker will then wander around your guilds and buy from them a selection of fortress goods. They are hauled to the depot and your broker barters with the traders himself. The better his skill in the relevant areas, the greater return he can pull from the deal. The goods then belong to the admin by virtue of the loan, and they are hopefully worth more than what you gave the broker, who also takes a commission. More frequent and varied caravans in the upcoming arc would aid this.
3. Local resource centres do trade deals with your admin. This is one of the original ideas of this thread in that you will have specific trade good abundances. You strike a deal, say x steel bars for y food and booze every season. On your behalf, your broker buys the bars from the metalworkers' guild with from the treasury. He then does the deal and the food an booze now belongs to admin, sold on to dwarfs for probably a profit. (((Profit from this generated in 2 ways, either the game forces you to get more dwarfbux worth of food and booze than you sold in metal, or local prices are scaled by commodity rarity. The first is easier to produce but less realistic/flexible, the latter vica versa)))
Because the game already has a set basic item quality and worth calculator, coin value (and more importantly coin worth) can be set. Actually, there's a subtle difference; the worth of items is actually calculated from the value of a dwarfbuk. With price scaling: the game looks at your total wealth with a static worth for each item. Then for each type of item the game calculates what percentage of total static worth that item represents, and then the actual in-game price is scaled accordingly.
Coin? Minting of coin only occurs when your bookkeeper has done the numbers and found that you don't have enough coin to represent the wealth you've created - however that is represented (exact, or some other way like in dwarf-hours of labour. I don't offer a solution to that). In which case you are made aware of this fact - or not; minting can be automated?
Sorry for the massive spoilered (possibly incoherent?) text, but it's late where I am.
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Topic: Abundance of Resources, Metalworking, Improved Economy, and Caravans (Read 22975 times)