a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Rather than littering the map with flat rocks, I would rather there be quarries that you can mine a lot of stone from. Then let people make gravel and perhaps latter on cement or tar.
I would rather more effort be spent on making late game more challenging than making early game more difficult.
Currently the late game is really boring, because it's pretty safe. It would be preferable if there was an actionable challenge. For example, resource depletion as an inevitable unavoidable thing is not an actionable challenge. Having a next tier of tools in order to refine that resource from new sources or in a less wasteful way is actionable.
I would like there to be some downside to dense populations. In reality you will have problems with sanitation, sickness, and pollution. The only aspect of this that we have is pollution, where there is nowhere to put something down because people leave crap lying around.
I would like to see more discussion on this idea. I'd be particularly interested in seeing Jason's take on it.
I see. You want to avoid creating too many objects, but the nature of the goal requires many states.
Rather than having k objects representing k states, you can have n+m objects representing n*m states by using two separate objects (pump/barrel + rod). That is definitely clever. Option one and two essentially do this. Option three just simplifies the state space by replacing sub-states with timed free for all.
With all of that being said, option 1 seems to be closest to what you want, where as option 2 is a more convenient version of it.
Have you considered getting rid of fixed bucket counts per firing, and instead making them probabilistic?
dry pump# Age n
firing pump# Age n
wet pump# Age nwet pump# Age n -> wet pump# Age n (6/7) | dry pump# Age n+1 (1/7)
firing pump# Age n -> wet pump# Age n (4/5) | wet pump# Age n+1 (1/5) (except when n = 5)dry pump# Age 5 = exhausted pump
Since firing technically has more states than explicitly written, I can see how this still would result in a lot of objects. It's still n * m, but I've made m smaller by 6 objects by getting rid of bucket counting. Another downside is that minimum uses goes down to 4.
I really like this the philosophy behind this idea. The reality is that we care about our genes in a way that is difficult for OHOL to replicate with its current mechanics.
First of all, you couldn't curse them. Keep cursing in the family.
This is a two way street. It's a bad thing you you can't curse someone, but it's a good thing that someone can't curse you. I would say overall this does incentivize ingroup preference, since griefers are the main people worried about cursing.
I think the ability to exile others from the family could be a replacement for cursing if it could be done right.
Second, what if there was a special weapon with no slow-down effect that you could only use on outsiders. Call it the sword (keep the knife between friends---it's more close-range).
While this doesn't incentivise anything directly, it indirectly incentivizes ingroup preference based on the fact that your ingroup can't kill you as easily.
I'm looking for other ideas to give the "otherness" of other families some gameplay consequence. Property fences are an optional way. I also thought about a natural spring head that was only usable by one family, somehow...
One thing you can do is have it so that when two people of separate families occupy the same tile, there is a small chance that one of them gets sick. The idea is that the ingroup all carries diseases to which they've developed immunity, but because of different immunities between groups, commingling will cause health issues.
I wonder what other ways there are to accomplish this goal of ingroup preference.
If I'm the one that triggered the probability explanation, then I apologize. I should have explained that I actually have a pretty decent understanding of probability, and most of the stuff explained was already clear to me. What is unclear was what exactly you want the expected value and variance to be as well as what other restrictions you want. I figure you would be able to find the correct use count (n) and use probability (p) on your own. The only downside I see to negative binomial distribution is that it imposes n-1 minimum uses, when you might prefer more or fewer minimum uses.
Options 1 and 2 have little to do with probability and are more about pump transparency. They let villagers determine how much water is left. These solutions confuse me, because they seem to be addressing another goal entirely.
Your last comment is about how you don't want useage to be conflated with age. In that case, you could have a delay timer transition the pump through various tiers, with later tiers having a higher probability of being exhausted. Usage could also have a probability of changing the tier as well, to create a "wear and tear" effect. I don't mind doing some math for you if I got more specific parameters. Markov chains are helpful for solving problems regarding probabilistic finite automata.
Perhaps what's going on is that you've already solved the probability aspect of it, and now you're just trying to solve the transparency aspect, enabling towns to make informed decisions regarding when to upgrade the pump?
Nobody told you it was wrong to kill someone without reason.
Everyone plays OHOL bringing their understanding of morality into the game, so I have to disagree on this point. Also the game also imposes penalties to killing, since player loses interaction capabilities temporarily. There is also far less incentive to kill in OHOL.
Delving deeper I focused more on the traditions that seem to contradict IRL morals in some ways. It becomes apparent very quickly that females tend to run the show, girls are the most valuable resource and if there are none left the town is doomed. Occasionally you might even come across 'amazon' camps where males are exiled or executed.
Makes sense in the game, girls die - town dies. But isn't it the same with humankind as well?
So why does OHOL mainly produce matriarchal societies, whereas humanity skewed heavily towards patriarchy? I am sure it's mostly just due to numbers and lack of physical differences between genders (no pregnancy/related complications), but it makes me wonder if early human tribes actually were ruled by women, as the death of all females would lead to the death of the tribe.
Matriarchy does not encourage women to have children or to take better care of their children. The opposite is true. When women get power, they are more likely to see their children as a burden. This is because their matriarchal responsibilities are at odds with their parental responsibilities rather than being complementary. Countries with higher birth rates tend to be more patriarchal.
The mechanics of sex in OHOL make it unwise to compare its sexual phenomena to that of humans. Men are effectively barren women, and there is no sexual dimorphism beyond that. OHOL is closer to a polygynous ants than it is to humans regarding sexual mechanics.
Another thing I pondered about was why people are more likely to grief in larger towns and how boredom and lack of purpose leads people to 'immoral' decisions.
Your only goal is survival, but you only have one life. If you are born into a small village your purpose is usually clear, as it's easy to find something to do that helps secure the survival of yourself and your tribe. These lives usually tend to be 'fun', as you always feel that you contribute and it hardly gets boring.
But be born into a large town that is superfluous with food and littered with half-finished projects, you usually find yourself wandering about looking for stuff to do. Survival isn't important anymore, you get bored and don't have much motivation to finish other people's work or start a long-term building project yourself. Some might just busy themselves doing odd things here and there, some just talk shit by the berries, some kill themselves, and others start taking out their boredom on others and become destructive. But none of it ever feels like it has any meaning or makes any difference.
I think there is truth in this observation, but it is mixing up separate things. Rates of crime and rates of suicide/depression are separate. Crime is going down while suicide is going up. I think abundance plays a role in some of the dysfunction, but I think ideology plays a bigger role. I don't think ideology plays a significant role in OHOL, though. That is to say, you don't have OHOL religions that give people a sense of community or lead to more generosity among the tribe.
I don't understand how 1 or 2 affect variance. All they seem to do is give insight as to how much water is remaining.
I wish I understood what the goal here was. I've read the variance thread but even then I found the goal to be a bit unclear. The variance thread looked like there was a desire to entertain probability solutions, but the goal wasn't clear there either.
Option 2 seems to be the most reliable solution provided, but I don't know what it is solving.
The idea here is very simple. I was thinking about how easy it is to turn a Bowl of Wheat into a Bowl of Flour. Because it is so easy, it makes creating a mill or some sort of grinding machine pointless. One solution would be requiring the player to pay a time cost on a transition, such that they can't control their character until the transition is done. The problem with this solution is that time costs are annoying and there would be a lot of whining if there wasn't some means of canceling a transition, which would complicate things further. I think a simpler solution is to just have an upfront energy cost for certain transitions, which only happen if the player has enough food pips.
There are a lot of interesting consequences of such a feature.
Wrong tool for the job situations: this means people would be given more options to accomplish the same task, but some options waste food.
Deeper tiering: this goes back to the rock vs mill example. Rather than needing a mill to create flour, it could just be a more energy efficient method of getting it.
Food mechanics: eating could be implemented through transitions, by having negative food costs.
To be honest, I believe the reason that tech in this game is so bizarre is because tiering is binary. The only way to motivate a tool or structure is for it to create something its predecessor couldn't create. The real reason we use better tech is because it is more convenient, not just because previous tech was incapable of doing the job.
Having sheep drop two mutton instead of four would be good.
I've actually worked on this a bit to improve the difficulty info. In theory you could estimate how long it takes to find a natural object based on its spawn chance. Then add those two numbers together for each object up the chain.
Adding them isn't necessarily right because things can be done in parallel. I guess your estimate would be of the total man-hours.
The challenge comes when you need to track reusing objects that you don't need to craft again because otherwise the numbers blow up really quickly.
For finite use tools, divide the crafting time by the expected number of uses.
Each item would need to know if an infinite use tool was used to craft it to prevent double counting, which might be overkill.
You could just ignore the craft time of infinite use tools, or treat them as finite use tools with a huge number of uses.
Maybe for situations where the infinite use tool has a higher crafting time than the other ingredient, you add it in.
Irrigation should probably take up a tile, and water the adjacent tiles. It should probably use rubber hoses as well. Maybe we want water towers first.
There is BBCode guide linked in the under the Quick reply on how to use img tags.
I like the watering can idea. It could work just like Tank of Kerosene, but it can be used in the bowl of water transitions.
My honest guess would be that Jason wanted the engine to debut with something special, and cars are what came to mind. Since we already had a well pump, only having it for the well would not have been too exciting.
Only 3 hours of game play?
You should try living out a handful of lives to old age, then mess around with the zoom out mod.
Theres a reason why towns can't get past ~35 generations.
What reason would that be?
Last few towns I lived that died off did so because no one was being born, and eventually there were no fertile women.
Right now the game is based around crafting with item combinations, i.e. milkweed + milkweed = thread, thread + thread = rope, rope + stakes = snare. This means that even if there were another use for milkweed besides making thread/rope (say, milkweed + stone = linen, linen + needle = cloak), while it might encourage people to plant more milkweed, it won't make it any easier for you to get the rope you're wanting. Milkweed will get planted more and then used to make linen.
Since fires have AOE heat mechanics, it's possible for milkweed to have a AOE bug repellent effect. Regardless, There are multiple ways to give milkweed alternate purposes without altering mechanics in the game. For example, you can have it so using a bowl and milkweed gives some special item, while still allowing you to pick it. More importantly, this can be done in an effort to make the game more challenging.
Wow, you even killed her. Does pein have some OHOL soap opera episode every day?
I don't want to make the game easier, but I do hate how I almost always find myself wanting rope and being unable to find it. I end up planting a bunch of milkweed crops and if I try to do some other productive thing while it is growing, another guy just takes it all.
It would be nice if milkweed had some other purpose that made it more compelling for people to plant it. For example, straw can be used for flour, baskets, and compost. There is no choice but for a higher civilization to farm it as they run out of soil. For milkweed, you'll have some civilizations with carts and some civilizations without any. In fact, the prevalence of baskets, carts, and backpacks are basically a metric for the average IQ of the village you're born into. Maybe some people like that this aspect of the game has more variety than other aspects.
Anyway, you could make the game more challenging while encouraging milkweed cultivation by having it be a requirement for some other thing. For example, if you grow milkweed, it lowers the chances of nearby crops being eaten by bugs.
What do you guys think?
I randomly sampled some 5-minute walk radius squares on the map.
There are roughly 3000 pieces of iron ore in such a map square, and 300 iron veins.
You randomly sampled this? How many samples are we talking?
What about theoretical probability? For some radius walk distance, you will have T tiles.
If biomes are equiprobable, then T/7 tiles are Badlands biome tiles.
Suppose badlands spawn iron at rate I, and iron veins at rate V. Veins have X iron on average.
Then I think the amount of iron be: T/7 * (I + X * V)
Another thing to consider is that Eves do not want to settle down in badlands biomes. So T should be calculated after having subtracted out some inner radius to be fair.
At 40 average ore per vein, this is 15,000 total ore in a 5-minute walking radius.
Onetech lists the average of iron to be 21 per vein. What's going on here?
The long-term pressure is supposed to come from iron. Clearly, there's no pressure there. At all.
So is the goal here to ensure that civilizations do not last very long?
Since the apocalypse was not very popular, this is meant to keep civilizations in check?
I suppose it would encourage expert players do migrations.
Edit: Woah, I didn't know how old this post was. I guess increased iron scarcity update was something that happened a while ago. I was thinking that even the current rates of iron were going to be dropped.
I would say that the new update gives us Kerosene, pulleys, and pipes, which I can see having many other uses in the future. Currently though, their only use is to make it easier to pump water.
This thread has me thinking. It would be cool if onetech were to calculate the theoretical minimum time to create any item.
For spawned entities, the minimum time would be zero. A more realistic alternative is to use spawn frequency to determine some expected amount of time to find said resource.
For output entities, the minimum time would be the minimum time of its transitions. This means transitions themselves would have a minimum time, though it wouldn't need to be visible. The idea is that a bowl of water obtained from a pond would would be chosen over a bowl of water obtained from a bucket from a Newcomen well.
For any transition, the minimum time it takes is the maximum of its non-timer input entities, plus its timer inputs. The idea is that the inputs could be crafted in parallel, meaning the minimum time is decided by the entity taking the longest time to craft. Since timers can't be accomplished in parallel, they would need to be added.
The hand could be treated as a sort of timer input, though I'm not sure what it's duration would be. This would ensure that crafting depth is not completely ignored, and take into account there is an animation time spent when it comes to using items.
This would be a slightly better way to measure difficulty. I know it's not that important of a feature, but it seems like implementation wouldn't be too hard.
I think it would be nice to hold someone's hand.
The leader would could invite someone to hold their hand by clicking on them with an empty hand. The invitation is finished if either party moves away. The follower can accept by clicking back on them with an empty hand.
If hand holding is initiated, then either both parties would be in the same tile or the follower would always enter the tile the leader once was in. The latter solution probably adds in some complexity due to things like closing doors, animations, and such.
The follower can cancel hand holding by clicking away. The leader can cancel by clicking on the follower.
To make things more silly, you could allow people to chain it by clicking on the follower. This would allow weird Christmas parades.
I think it balances itself out, because when holding hands you don't get to hold anything else besides worn inventory. Though it is a bit sad because I figured this feature would be more useful for Eve runs where being empty handed is pretty dangerous.