a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Besides, griefing is still very much doable without getting cursed. You just have to be smart about it. Just running around stabbing people is not a fun form of drama because the knife dance is a mediocre combat system.
Please no. Griefer drama is terrible. Drama arises organically from resource shortages is much better.
Also, I support giving mines more stages. IMO pick should get you 3-5 ore from a vein before it turns to a hole, then 10-15 ore from each mine upgrade level. We already have stanchion tech for next level, maybe next level could be locked behind growing some domestic tree for bracing so you'd need multi-generational effort to do it and you'd have to carefully manage your iron supply while waiting for the next tech level. If pick on vein gave some ore loose ore could be less common.
Who the hell uses a shovel to dig up potatoes anyway? Whenever my family planted them, we'd use a hoe to clear the mounded dirt and expose the potatoes. I think in game potatoes should need one use of hoe to remove the mound and then you just pick them by hand from the row.
IMO building isn't pointless because it's all eventually lost, it's pointless because it doesn't confer any real benefits. Roads are the closest to useful, but even with them what's the need to go out of a self-sustaining city? At most you need to bring in a cart of iron every couple of generations, and the time saved on that with road is hardly worth the time spent building the road.
You can also increase iron consumption with new recipes. Nails for example could be used for all sorts of stuff.
IDK, berries are barely enough in Eve camp. I think the food value per berry is fine, they just need to be less spammable.
Also, water could be looked into as pressure for efficiency. The problem is the highly randomized number of ponds, so it's kinda hard to balance production per pond. What if ponds were a lot fewer, but more reliable? Something like one guaranteed pond for each 100x100 tiles map section that is at least 50% swamp tiles, but no more than one pond per such section. A lot bigger capacity of course, and the same goes for wells. It looks kinda silly to multiple wells right next to each other anyway. You could up well cost if fewer wells were needed I guess. And to compensate early camps for having fewer eggs swamps could spawn frogs that you can catch and cook.
Anyway, I don't think the basic food mechanics are faulty, it's just that the current berry meta makes it too easy. If spamming berries depleted water too fast we'd have to be more efficient, and the yum bonus will naturally become more important as it extends the food supply a lot.
Mango is a minor leak, the main one is compost. Compost is practically infinite if you have a mimimum of skill at the game. I think you should look into plugging this leak. For example, let's say the current compost recipe is a bit phosphorus deficient. So instead of watering the dry pile with plain water, you had to water it with diluted guano. Guano could be a rare spawn in desert, where you can collect one basket per spot. You can split it into three bowls of guano and add a bowl of guano to a bowl of water to make the diluted stuff, or to make bucket tech even more rewarding you could dump a basket of guano into a bucket of water and get ten units of guano water. When the desert guano runs out you could kill a bear and mine a couple of baskets worth of guano from it's empty cave. That should last long enough to get to some synthetic fertilizer to replace compost or just the guano, and that fertilizer could depend on another depletable resource.
As for buildings, protection from elements just doesn't work with the gameplay, you have to be out and about and occasional bad weather that stopped you from going out would just feel like theft of our limited time. So buildings need some other purpose. I think the best fit is making them required for construction of advanced infrastructure. This advanced infrastructure can serve to either stretch your limited resources, or to increase your work efficiency which is needed to stay afloat as the required crafting chains become longer with tech tier. Examples of resource saving could be a stove which burns longer than an open fire, a large smelter that you load with ten ore but receive twelve iron (poured into pig iron molds rather than beaten from bloom), or a brick oven that retains heat a lot longer. Efficiency boosting could mostly be about improved space usage to cut down on walking and accommodate all the ingredients needed for the longer crafting chains. Stuff like shelves that store 3x3 items with direct access, or tables with 2x2 slots for plates or bowls where you can do all the interactions with the pottery as if it was on the ground (can the engine do this?).
Yeah, all the stuff added after compost just extends the girth of the trunk, it doesn't actually make the tech tree any taller. Don't get me wrong, you definitely need some lateral expansion like this, but going up is also important. Like, when you're Eve you're under pressure to get into pottery tech before wild food runs out, then you're under pressure to get into steel tech before the ponds run out, and finally you have to get sheep tech before soil pits run out. But once you've reached sheep you've achieved a stable state and there's no real need for any new stuff. Sure, milk or mangos are nice, but you can survive just fine without them. It's just luxuries, not essentials. And all that's left to do now if you want to be a productive member of society is farming and cooking. Other stuff that might be fun to do for a change of pace is simply utterly useless, like building for example (worse than useless actually because you're taking away tiles for no benefit whatsoever).
Can we please go back to this design philosophy?
PS if you really wanna grief towns, forget about eliminating girls. Just dedicate your life to cutting all the wheat around the town, and then cut all the wheat in town. If caught cutting the last play dumb and say you didn't know, and that you're gonna go get new seeds to fix it. Should make you fairly curse proof. No wheat means no compost, and no compost means no town. It's better than eliminating a bloodline, because even if an Eve spawns in that town she won't be able to restart it. Eliminating wheat is better than eliminating carrots because wheat seeds have a fairly limited lifespan, so you can make it completely impossible to bring seeds from the wilderness if you clear a big enough radius.
Say what you want. But baby suiciders are just selfish players that don't want to play unless they get the perfect life they want. To put it as was said in the suicide is op thread... They wake up and see daddy isn't wearing a Rolex, and go, "Nope, not playing this life. GG, I'm out."
I'd wager that most people suicide because there *is* a Rolex. There's simply no challenge whatsoever in an established town. You do it a couple of times and you figure out optimal ways to do things, and then it's just going through the motions, no thinking required. I can take one life like that, but multiple in a row is just plain tedious. But because towns are virtually impervious to failing on their own they persist for ages, so all the server population gets forced into them and every life is this boring life of no challenge. I reckon the suicide problem would decrease by orders of magnitude if civilization was more fragile, as you'd get a more balanced distribution of high tech and low tech lives. Damn, how I wish Jason actually meant it when he posted this thread. At best I can hope that the influx of Steam players will destabilize civilization for a short while at least.
Also, is it intentional that plaster walls don't decay? I think it's a good thing because it makes the walls actually useful.
Those trees in your backyard won't last more than three or four generations.
More like farmer, but yeah. Except they fatten them up before stabbing.
Anyway, mangoes are OP. They should have a limited lifespan IMO, like 5-10 harvests.
This really ruins my Eveing. I always keep my first kid because having a grown kid when you start settling can be a huge boon (worth more than a basket with fire kit IMO). But I certainly don't have time to read baby talk while I'm running around looking for a spot while dodging animals. Stopping to talk with baby drastically increases chances of me starving.
The baby phase would be a great time to communicate if the mother had a reasonable character limit. As it is, most of the time I simply don't bother, because getting cut off mid-word while trying to explain anything is just so damn frustrating.
They are MILK COWS. No beef.
What do you think happens to the male calves of milk cows?
Nice update, but why oh why do we poison cows instead of slaughtering them? Not only is it a missed opportunity for beef, but it makes griefing cows trivially easy.
People would be a lot more likely to carry babies around while they work if breastfeeding blocked births. Nothing worse than showing my baby around the town and having another pop out while we're far from warmth.
As for bored people, I think the problem is that we can easily achieve a steady state where we can sustain a town virtually infinitely. Sure, there's limited iron, but the town will be long dead from griefers, bad luck with the RNG or low server pop before the iron runs out. IMO there should be some natural resource limiting compost earlier than iron, and as new tech is added that resource should be replaced by another finite resource.
A big part of the problem is the same baby suiciding in the same town over and over again. Babies need lineage ban too. Yeah, it makes it harder for towns to get babies, but that might not be a bad thing. Right now when I'm born into a town I feel like people don't really care about me, babies are a dime a dozen. Heck. they might even let me die as a male because they know I'll respawn back and the next time I might be female. I think babies should be a bit more precious than that, and giving the town only one shot at getting a specific player does that.
Speaking of lineage ban, it should be changed to birthplace ban. A big chunk of suiciders do it because there's simply no challenge in a sheep era town. If the ban was location based they could actually strike out on their own and start from scratch while still having enough babies.
As for forcing players to play the life they're given, that's a bad call IMO. I don't like towns because of lack of challenge and novel things to try. Either you need to increase the speed at which you're adding content at least tenfold so I've got new stuff to try for a whole week, or make game at all stages actually challenging. Otherwise I'll only be playing a couple of sessions on an update day. I'm pretty sure a lot of the veterans feel the same. And no babies at all isn't much better than suicide babies.
Jason, the problem with striking out on your own is that you still share the same pool of potential babies as your original family, and since there's usually only two or three simultaneous towns on servers that means a lot of people will be lineage banned from you. If you're in an established family you get a lot less babies than a true Eve, and in these conditions it's very hard for Eve to raise girls into adulthood, having less shots at it is devastating.
Forget gates, just give us stiles. Basically a fence tile that a person can walk over but livestock can't.
I really don't get the whole deal about nudity, it's not graphic and it's not pornographic. Shouldn't a far bigger issue for people concerned about the kids be how you can stab and murder people in the game?