a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
You are not logged in.
Yeah, you're right about hacking this for 2-way radio by switching leaders back and forth. Thanks for noticing that.
And long-distance communication of any kind doesn't make sense either. I do want radio to be an out-of-reach someday tech for communicating with outposts.
Ok, im relieved to hear that.
Okay, so what about a more word-of-mouthy system?
Forget two types of orders. Say there's only one, and it gets passed down the tree whenever possible, but ONLY passed to direct followers.
King issues ORDER, ALL FARMERS REPORT TO TOWN CENTER
Whatever Dukes are near the King get this order and see it right away. Then they hold the order in their order slot, server-side. When they run into one of THEIR follows, that follower gets the order, holds it, and passes it on to their own followers.
Maybe it will piggy-back speech, so you have to run into someone and talk to them, or maybe just being within some distance of them will trigger it. You follow them? Do they have a pending order? Do you have that order? If not, then take the order, display it, and hold it for your followers.
For this to work in a sensible way, there can be only one order in each person's holding-slot at a time. It either came down from above, or you issued it yourself. And issuing your own order would override the order from above for whichever followers haven't heard it yet.
I got a few questions.
- What's the effective distance at which the order can be trasmitted? 'Cause if it's too small, then there's effectively no difference between "issuing an order" and "just running around the town spamming text".
- Is the trasmission of an order automated? Like, when you issue it as a king, the dukes with a free order slot will automatically issue it aswell? Or do they receive the order messege and have to repeat the command? In first case there's a problem with every order automatically being heard by everyone, thus no way to just hold a private council with dukes; in second case we might have dukes forgetting to relay the order forward or not knowing how to.
- How long does the order occupy the order slot? We could run into stuff like " a Baron goes off on a horsecart to get water from a distant well and when he gets back he's met with an order to meet for a council, but the council has already been held 10 mins ago" and problems with issuing new orders if dukes have the slot occupied by the last one (or do new order by the king override their slot forcefully?)
Overall +1. If the distance is limited, then it would be pretty useful without being broken.
Uhm. I disagree with the first part. Since the speciality upgrade we had like...what? 7? towns reach diesel era and exhaust several tarry spots.
I mean, yeah, in those towns people jsut have nothing better to do than to fabricate drama... but that's how life works in the endgame: a few people who know what to do work their asses off just so the majority can live in luxury.
I sorta agree with the lowtetch-nightmare part. Rushing a belltower for your town to stand a chance to reach engine kinda feels unnatural.
As about the cars and planes, they have seldom ever been used even before this upgrade. Their main problem is that they're like 90% useless. A horsecart with ruber tires is 50% more efficient than a car, but is laughably easier to make AND to sustain. As for the plane, there's really no way to fly it anywhere that isnt also reachable by a horse from the same town (i mean, who's ever gonna build a landing strip for you?). And, you said it, it takes a split second for them to get lost forever.
DestinyCall wrote:Why do we even have the shallow row/deep row distinction? It just feels like busy work. So much extra clicking.
Because hardened rows require more soil, but only one tilling.
Establishing a farm the first time requires double tilling OR extra soil (now 3, was 2).
After that, keeping the farm going in the same spot requires 1 soil and single tilling.
So establishing a farm, or expanding it, requires more resources than maintaining the existing farm.
That makes sense. You're preparing virgin ground for farming. Also, it makes you think twice before expanding. If your existing farm is just barely large enough to feed your peeps, you should stick with that... maybe.
The busy-work you speak of occurs only when expanding your farming.
Exept for wheat farm and milkweed farm... Just curious, why are those two so soil-wasteful?
With two people. They can follow each other in turns, this won't even break the tree.
A radio can still be better. Like tunics: same thing as hovering the mouse over the character, just more streamlined. But I guess they might need to be cheaper to be a viable strategy? I don't know if people are using radios to talk to other towns right now.
Demn, that's even more broken than what i thought.
And no, radio has hardly ever been used as intended. As far as i can recall we had like...5? successful inter-town cummunication in the last half a year, since the Bee and Blondin times (never bothered with radios before then). Normally a radio gets made in belltown and just..... sits there, working as a translator at best. Other towns normally die out before reaching a radio or get abbandoned shortly after.
...
So, basically... now, when you're a king, you can send a baron to another settlement and have their direct follower right next to you. Then the baron will send orders to the follower, he'll relay them to you and you will send orders to the baron. Effectively achieving long distance communication with three people, doable since eve camp. Without the use of a radio. Without the need of cellphones. Just with bare telepathy.
I mean, it would be useful, yeah, but...... is this really the vision you have for your game?
I could understand a "shout" where a king gets himself heard in his whole town, but global... wtf?
If i remember correctly, premades stopped being able to curse when the curse system was reworked in a way that getting 5-6 people to curse you and live would effectivly send the victim out of the rift and straight into donkey town for an undetermined amount of time time.
I mean, that was potentially a kinda scary exploit, where six or so coordinated people could evacuate everybody to the safety of a limitless world exile people to donkey town.
But yeah, now we got no rift, new curse system and, frankly, getting cursed by 2-4 people who normally twin is pretty much just as effective as being cursed by only one of them: you cant be born in the town they're already in. That's about it.
Idk if Jason just forgot to revert it back or if he's keeping it that way for another reason.
+1
Honestly, literally any use could do. It's so sad to see them in the game and not being able to do anything with them. And unlike Jack o' lanterns, christmas trees, snowmen and masks, here we have something that potentially could have so many uses.
Really, just tying a dog to a propriety gate and commandind it to bite everyone who tries to pass without having access would do.
DarkDrak wrote:Also2, 2HOL is a pretty irrelevant example of working no-killing meccanics. If you greif there, you get a ban and it's over for good. With that kind of system, ofc there's no need for killings or curses.
Has something changed with 2HOL? Last time I played it I was killed by a griefer.
Wait, really? I havent played it in like forever. Perhaps im confusing it with ccm. My bad.
I object.
If there's someone who's fine with just packing up and leaving town every time there's a greifer in it, then they have a pretty demn strong dedication to Gandhi's teachings. I, for one, can't do that. If someone makes a point to exist for the sole purpose of annoying others, they gotta be taught the hard way that they cant do that.
I wouldnt like to play a game where every time someone decides to screw a town over, the other 10-15 people in it had no choise other than packing up and leaving or sitting in a corner and crying. I wouldn't like to play a game where someone can just adze the floor i make every time i lay it down and i could do nothing about it.
Also imo playing only for the sake of your own lineage is a questionable decision. Sure, it's nice to see the family you made prosper, but if no new lineage can be born because yours lasts forever... that'd be annoying for a lot of other folks, wouldnt it?
Also2, 2HOL is a pretty irrelevant example of working no-killing meccanics. If you greif there, you get a ban and it's over for good. With that kind of system, ofc there's no need for killings or curses.
Hold up. If the whole point of this is to facilitate communication and not to diversify social structures of towns... can't we just have people learn to speak with 60-character bubbles by the age of 16? Then, if you got someone you need to warn your village of, just run around the place and repeat the same text with the up arrow key. Make sure that everyone reads it. it should take no more than a minute every time you got a major emergency, as opposed to countless lifetimes needed to estabilish a working social chain
Onetetch marks the Feast Table as uncraftable. All the craftable counterparts are still in "unreleased content" part. No clue as to why.
...So it actually works until the butter?
Another question: how does an exiled person learn that they are exiled?
If you implement a visual mark on the exiled people, then having a scar suddenly appear on their body will probably make them realize their new status
Another question: If your Duke dies, what is your relationship to the King? You are suddenly Dukeless.
If you follow a King directly, instead of through a Baron-Count-Duke chain, what are you? Is he your King or your Baron?
"I follow no Nobles. My allegiance is directly to the King himself."
Shortcut to Duke? Get one follower, then follow the King directly.
What if you follow him solo as a Baron, and then later a Duke follows him, making him King?
When a Baron's last follower dies, is he no longer a Baron?
If people at the bottom of the tree die, can an King go from being a King to a Duke?
Imo, a person's social status should be only influenced by the social statuses of people who follow him.
examples:
Peasant Bob following Paesant Mark will make Mark a Baron
- If Bob dies before Mark and Mark has no more followers, Mark's status remains that of a Baron 'cause he had a paesant's trust.
If Paesant Bob follows a King, the king doesnt get downgraded to Baron, because he still has had a Duke's trust, nor does Bob get a promotion 'cause he still has nobody under him. He's just a paesant following a king.
Alternatively it could be determined by the number of people following you, but, regardless, the ranks should be "unlockable" and stay "unlocked" once they are reached.
Like, the hierarchy should determine how trustable a person is in the villege. If a baron is a trusted guy, then the count is a trusted^2 guy and so on.
The real problem, imo, is that nearly nobody's gonna run around the town to see who the most productive player is, so they can elect them a king. Instead people are gonna annoy others to get followers and be kings themselves and we'll, not only see a great decrease in the working population of a villege, but will also probably get stuck with people who just became kings for the sake of becoming kings and have no idea what to do as one. And, as always, the veterans will be too busy keeping the place together to bother overthrowing the sloth, unless he actively greifs the place.
I see this as an interesting meccanic on paper, that will, however, end up bringing lots of genocide, drama and famine, which is kinda ok in more advanced towns i guess, but could be a bit too rough on starting towns.
If you're gonna implement it anyways, pls, eventually let kings have the power of elders, with removal notices and permanent ink by the age of 20. So they can move that sheep pen and write down some laws.
The problems here imo is that the trade shouldnt be something a family needs to survive. It should be something that makes their life easier, but manadgeble without. Also it's as imbalanced as it could possibly get, with 2 out of 4 of the races that just cant survive without merging.
Would've been much more obtainable by twisting the map so some some town locations are blessed with lots of rabbit holes but are very low on goodeponds. Or that they have abbundance of rocks but those locations are low on clay.
And the specialization problem would feel more balanced if a fam would be specialized in 2 biomes instead of 1. Thematically they're just intollerant to cold instead of being at ease only in dryness or in humidity. Visually, we could have blacks be born to gingers for example.
Welp. We'll get somewhere around there eventually.
I mean, the first option would solve the problem of players roeplaying a serial killer, but would make defending the town against multiple greifers pretty much impossible, since chances are there are only like 1-3 people in a town who actually care to do it. Even if serial killers are in minority, so are vigilantes.
The second option would prevent people being killed individually but uhh... it has lots of back sides. You cant defent your own propriety, you cant have fights outside town. And if the greifer is smart, he'll accuse you of greifing first, get some noob to join his posse and then kill you and get back to greifing.
Also, there's a problem of sabotaging. If people cant kill others, they'll just gonna start stealing and hiding their pies and maliciously watch the villege starve. But that's another issue, isnt it?
What if killing a person made you depressed? Forced a sad face on you and if you kill someone else while depressed, you die of depression. But depression would run off in like 30? minutes and townsfolk could cheer you up, reducind it by idk...5-10? A solo player would get 2-3 kills per game but the town vigilante would get cheered up by the villege and can keep protecting it.
So sad. I always longed to see trade becoming viable in OHOL. The closest we get is mutual charity work though.
I've been trying some inter family trade the past few lives. To see if families can survive without merging. Between desert folks and jungle folks it kinda worked.
As a desert folk, I brought bowls of sulfur, took some rubber tires. or a bucket of latex and bowls of kernels.
As a jungle folk, I just came to a desert villege, filled their buckets with latex and bowls with kernels and took bowls of sulfur away with me.
Trade can work if you wanna do it. Would've loved to trade glassworth and sand for sugar canes, but alas, life's too short.
But how do you trade with tundra folks? If you go looking for them, chanses are that you need oil, right? But they never reach that kind of tecnology by the time you find them. The best you can do is to ask a young girl to follow you to your town, so they can build an oil pump there. Tradewise, that would be... trade rubber for a slave? Exept that at this point it's the equivalent of merging, since nobody's keeping track of who's a slave here.
And as a ginger what do you do? Seal skins are at least 3 times rarer than sulfur and half as useful. If you go get them, there wont even be enough for your own village. Are gingers expected to rush oil pumpjack before newcommen well and survive on nearby deep wells as they trade off oil?
So, how does a family survive while avoiding merging? I gave it a serious try, but...
...Am I missing something here? Where are those babies coming from?
Focusing on the "compete for the babies" thing and ignoring other facturors, shouldnt it be a self-balancing graph?
Let's assume we have 50 Fertile mothers on the server, 100 total players and 4 families.
Fam A: 30 Fertiles, 60 people
Fam B: 15 Fertiles, 30 people
Fam C: 4 Fertiles, 8 people
Fam D: 1 Fertile, 2 people
Now lets assume that half of a family dies in half an hour (realistic, no?). Also that every half an hour 20 people take a break (among those who died, distributed proportionally) and 20 new people come to play (probably a too generous of an assumption)...
After that half an hour, we'll have:
20 players with no area bans
18 people area banned from fam A
9 people area banned from fam B
2 people area banned from fam C
1 person area banned from fam D
50 People total to be reborn.
12 + 0 + 7.7 + 1.3 + 0.6 = 21.6 people born in Fam A
6 + 13.5 + 0 + 0.7 + 0.3 = 20.5 people born in Fam B
1.6 + 3.6 + 1 + 0 + 0.1 = 6.3 people born in fam C
0.4 + 0.9 + 0.3 + 0 = 1.6 people born in family D
If we devide these for the number of fertile mothers that each family had we'll get
0.72 babies/mom for Fam A
1.37 babies/mom for Fam B
1.58 babies/mom for Fam C
1,6 babies/mom for Fam D
After another hour, continuing with the same assumptions, we'll have 14 people area banned from both family A and B...
Please correct me if my math is wrong, havent been doing it for too long.
This doesnt really look like a snowballing meccanic to me, not until the large families spread across several towns to beat the area ban. Then the small fams are screwed.
DarkDrak wrote:And some people, building roads and bells, do it to use them later on for easier raids.
I suspected as much, Also to lure people in so they can kill you for loot.
a pretty low percentage of road builders do it with malitious intent though.
Some people just chill that way. It's a nice feeling to see that the fruit of your work is being used by dozens of others in hungreds of lives.
And it helps everyone orientate on the map.
And some people, building roads and bells, do it to use them later on for easier raids.
+1 to eve window compromise idea
-1 to "too few families left" reset condition. Even if, with the new curse system, it almost sounds viable... it will still end too soon.
But since you're gonna try it out anyways, at least keep in mind that right now the server population can drop down to 30 players, when people go to sleep.
And it's not uncommon to have over 10 people in one viable town.
I agree with Lava. It gets boring building ANOTHER engine ANOTHER oil pump.
New content keeps people coming back to try it out.
(...)
The amount of people who have no idea what they are doing is kind of shocking. It's very rare I get help with an engine or oil. People just survive until a smart player comes along and helps them.
I'm tired of it being me. It's always me making the engines and oil. They ask me to teach them but it's just Impossible. You can't teach an engine in one life time.
Welcome to the club lel. We've all been there.
Your next step is realising that it does NOT have to be you. You can just wash your hands off the whole engine making thing and leave it to someone else, while you play a different life.
The town's gonna die out anyways, wether you make an engine for it or not. So if someone comes and makes the thingy, good. if no one does, also good.
Or... People would just build several wells to newcomen pump until a young girl just runs away and pseudo eves in green pastures a decent distance away and people will just let the town die out. Rinse and repeat for every new town and the oil will become just a legend.
For trade to be viable, we gotta have cases in which trading a resource would be faster and easier than producing it, and cases in which producing the same resourse would be faster than trading for it.
The current map topografy gave me an idea: Oil can only be gotten from either tundra or desert. Rubber can only be made with a jungle. A mountain top can only have 1 or 2 of those....
So a town close to a jungle but far from desert or tundra could trade rubber for kerosene with a town far from jungle but close to tundra.
Exept now it cant happen for three reasons:
1) You cant trade with someone whom you cant even understand;
2) A town doesnt need either of those resources in big quantities, so trying to trade them is totally not worth the risk of being killed on sight. 2 trips to the jungle that's 300 tiles away from town gets enough palm kernels and latex to make 2 atmosferic cores, 1 driving meccanism and 1 diesel engine. 3 trips should be enough for the whole life cycle of a city;
3) Generally it's easier to kill off a town and loot it rather than estabilish a trading relationship with them. A huge part of it is the ability to block off the gates with irremovable stuff.
No, the "cursed out" would be a special case, separate from /DIE area bans.
So this idea adds a new case: There ARE mothers available to you, BUT all of them have cursed banned you. In that case, you go to d-town. D-town people can only have D-town babies.
What happens if there's one berry muncher that you couldnt stand and have cursed, and they cursed you back? The next day that berry muncher is a fertile female in a big town and you SID until all other fertiles have area banned you or are on cool down, exept for the berry muncher... At that point there are mothers available to you, but you're curse banned from that area.
Does cycling take precedence here? or do you end up in DT?
I mean, it would be a kinda strong deterrent from /dieing, but...
But if they are NOT symmetrical, and they only block the griefer getting born, that's fine, right? Even if it is area-based?
I'm also trying to think about how this system could be griefed.
+1 to no symmetry.
A typical way of how this might be greifed, that i can think of, is the classycal framing tactic:
Sabotage the town, then frame it on someone else and fake being the "hero".
Or be annoying to someone until they stab you, then play the victim and get them cursed.
Or sabotage the town, then, when a vigilante kills you, play the victim and get them cursed instead.
I've lost track of how many times i've seen this happening.
But i doubt that there's something that can be done about that one. People are at fault here, not the system.
Finally... what happens if you are "cursed out"? That means that every available mother for you in the game is within the radius of someone who has blocked you. That means no one wants to play with you currently.
So in that case, you go to d-town as usual (you do NOT get to be a rift Eve).
Hold on there. How is that implemented? You check for available mothers and if you find none, you're born in DT? Wont that work also in case of SIDing? Or quadding when comulatively the four of you are lineage banned from all families for natural reasons? How can one be born as a rift Eve then?
What if those totems were craftable objects? and could be set down fairly easly, like 1st tier apoc towers, but for them to be settled as monuments they needed to be integrated with some advanced stuff? Then they could be tracked down like monuments. The reset condition would look like: if last totem settled is older that 12h, reset.
By it being craftable it could be used as a tool to keep track of many different resources.
The crafting reciept could be something like this:
chisel + mallet on a log --> totem head - need: axe, chisel, adze, two trees - keeps track of trees and iron
tied shaft + totem head --> totem - need: straight shaft, rope - keeps track on maples and milkweed
totem + small trash pit --> placed totem (make it removable easly) - need: stakes, rouns stone, shovel - keeps track of iron and stones (added this one to avoid it becoming the new newcomen tower)
bowl of palm wax + placed totem --> waxed totem (still removable easly?) - need: basically a palm tree - keeps track of palm trees
goose feathers (several) + waxed totem --> decorated totem (still removable easly?) - need: feathers - keeps track of geese
cloth + decorated totem --> clothed totem - need: 6 bowls of berries and carrot, sheep, shears, loom - keeps track of sheep, berries and carrots
bloody knife + clothed totem --> bloody totem - need: a second player, maybe a medkit - keeps track of player faith in the cause
tank/bowl of kerosene + bloody totem --> bloody totem in kerosene - need: basically kerosene - keeps track of oil
firebrand + bloody totem in kerosene --> burning totem - need: straight shaft, firebow drill, leaf, tinder - keeps track of junipers and maples
burning totem + time --> sacrificed totem
sacrificed totem + buttered bread on clayplate --> sacrificed totem with offering - need: cow, bucket, corn, wheat, knife, plate, bowl - keeps track of wheat, corn, cows, bowls and plates
and that will be the monument.
I assume that engine-wise it would be a very cheap way to keep track of resource availibility on the map.
Though on the other hand, implementing something like this would be a lot of work.