a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I'm sorry Carrot, but your ideas are (mostly) terrible, especially the slaves part.
But I'll offer some counter suggestions that I believe are far superior, and have put a bit more thought into I suspect.
For the races, there should still be specialties, but they should be SOFTENED. By that I mean, each race still has something they can only do in a biome, but it isn't as specific. for instance:
Gingers: Sill needed to set up oil rig, but once set up, anyone can use it. Still the only ones who can fetch saltwater, but should be able to use a special item just for this. A barrel perhaps. Salt water wouldn't be fetched in regular buckets, but the barrel can be brought back to town and then others can draw from it like a cistern to make salt. Gingers still only ones to build snow houses.
Blacks: Wouldn't get hot in desert and only ones who could pick cactus. They could build a hot spring up so others could take from it, but only if they do the development first. This pumping station or whatever would only last 10 to 24 hours. Anyone can capture and tame a horse, but black should have a way to do it significantly faster and easier. Black only ones who can build structures in desert.
Browns: Only ones who can pick banana. Yellow fever should last only half as long if bitten by mosquito. Only browns can get rubber from a wild rubber tree, but Browns should be able to plant rubber trees outside of jungle, and domestic rubber trees can be harvested by anyone. You still need browns to plant them though. Same for mango and the other jungle plants. Anyone can use once the domesticated version is brought back to town and planted. They would be only ones who can build in jungle.
Blondies: Instead of just being translators, they are EXPLORERS and TRADERS. So, to make them less useless could get A FEW of the following abilities in addition to translating. 1) They ride horses faster 2) Snakes never tip a horse cart they are using 3) They can pick up items on the ground from ANY biome, but only things on the ground 4) They can build roads through any biome (but just road, still no buildings) 5) They can take handcarts through any biome without dropping the cart. 6) Their hunger bar drops half as fast when they are on a horse (don't have to stop and eat as often 7) If a Blondie is last to have dismounted a horse, it won't run off wild for up to 60 seconds (this one alone would be HUGE).
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Did I mention being able to force another player to be your slave is a horrible idea?
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As for tool slots, the obvious overhaul is to give a few less tool slots, but not require tool slots for many mundane items. People with low genetic score would maybe start with one less slot, but higher scores should cap out a little lower. Maybe 15 is max, not 19. Another way to do it is everyone would just start with a list of tools they automatically get so they don't use a slot up. Pencil for instance. Also the hatchet (but ax would use a slot). Hot coals should be free, as should shovel, hoe, and mallet. This could also make races more interesting without limiting. Maybe all Gingers learn the smith hammer automatically. Maybe Browns all know knife, etc.
How many tool slots you have used, vs how many left should show somewhere always, and should should be able to click to see a list of what you know.
Another novel idea I've has is that you don't get all of your slots at birth. You should have three that unlock as you age. One unlocks at age 15, another at age 30, and you get one last one at 50. I think this would be a good trade off with having more things that you can learn without using a slot, but still leave the number of tool slots available (during a lifetime) be the same as it is currently. Also, if you realize you accidentally maxed out all your slots early in life, and then it becomes clear something needs to be done with an adz, or a saw, you could just wait a bit until you get a little older (and wiser) and be able to do what needs to be done. As it is now, it's a little lame to realize you have no slots left, and even if you have 30 years of life left, you can't ever, ever, ever figure out that tool. That just doesn't make sense.
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No, seriously. It's so bad of an idea you should punch yourself in the face. Twice actually.
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Trade is not something that's really doable as the game exists. OHOL is really set up to be more like a hippy commune, where they don't recognize the concept of individual property. Everything we have belongs to everyone. I don't see a way for trade in a conventional sense to exist in this game. The only way it could work is if we gained some way for a player to make a little house that they could secure to their account and pass ownership to their next life. That being said, I'll describe how real home ownership could revolutionize the game.
HOMES: Would have to build stone walls and let them go ancient. I'd suggest the size would have to be 3x3 only. Once a 3x3 building has all ancient walls someone could claim it as their home. Only their account would be able to pick up any items in the house. In that way, we can really own things from one life to the next and keep the tools to continue to be the profession we like to play. You could set up a little bakery and people couldn't just come take your pies, they would have to bring you something. Ideally the materials for you to make more food stuff. If a baker could just cook stuff and not have to run all over gathering, you'd see all the rare foods being made. Think of how long a Yum! chain you could have!
It would serve as an anchor too. You would always be born as close to your house as possible. This also would be a reason not to grief if you own a house, because it could mean you are appearing further away from it when born. Yes, it also would mean you can't just stab every person who bothers you because you don't know or approve of what they are doing. Finally I'd say that once you claim a house, that lasts for only 7 days. Once time runs out you can renew it if you are there to claim it again before someone else does. So basically, it wouldn't be guaranteed that you couldn't keep the same house FOREVER, but 7 days is a pretty long timeframe in OHOL, and it would be a vast improvement over now, where at best you can secure things for only one lifetime with fences, but that's mainly being used as a way for griefers to steal shit that people can't get back for a while or to lock up others and let them starve.
while westwards movement speeds up, i can barely place enough flat stones to mark/connect all the small settlements and ruins diagonqally westwards.
I had to take a little break from the game, but if I return I want to continue to focus on being a road builder. That's mainly what i did up until now and I've laid on the current world about 2k of road.
We should team up and coordinate efforts. Are you on Discord?
we got very lucky to have a conservative player that saved a tool slot for their pencil. Most people use them all by middle age at the latest.
That was me. My genetic score is over 150. I never use all my tool slots.
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I'm on the verge of quitting this game designed to encourage and support anti-social gamer's enjoyment. It just seems to keep getting worse and worse. The fact that again, we are spread out over about 7k distance is a big part of the problem. You can't organize to stop griefers when you have 90 players on, spread out over 30 "towns", most of those being tiny fledgling startups. Half of players at this point don't even want to play in a town and will leave as soon as they are old enough to GTFO because they know towns are just griefer magnets, and they are sick of it. Once you have 5-6 bigger bell towns around at once, none of them have enough people to really operate like a big town anyway, and yet again, we are stuck in an endless cycle of playing caveman stage.
What do we need? Maybe a way to see if someone near you is someone you've cursed in the past, IDK....even 24 hours. Because as it is, cursing means nothing. So they can't be born super close to you? Big deal, they could be born close enough that they can get back to near you in like 2 minutes of walking. And even if they are really dead set on griefing a certain place and in one life you keep them away, as soon as you die you'll come back probably 5k away and they will come back near where they want to wreck.
But....
If I could see some kind of bad aura or something around someone who I've tagged before. Then I can do something with curses that's useful. It will mean more to not curse people over trivial things because then you won't be able to tell real problem people from some guy you cursed just because he picked up your cart to actually use it because you left it alone for 15 minutes and nobody knew you laid claim to it for all eternity.
I'd take my chances with getting run out of a town or killed because I carry a mark over all the people I'd see that are known offenders. I'd take that chance in a heartbeat. Because right now, the main tool we have to discourage bad behaviour and stop it is the CURSE, and it 100% does nothing.
Towns die from running out of people. That's the only way that any town dies.
And the town runs out of people because they die of starvation because they need food, and food takes water. So basically, what I said. Town runs out of water. If the town had water, they'd get people.
In fact, I would prefer to see OHOL's ecology reworked to be 100% sustainable, if resources are managed carefully by each generation.
I would settle for resources running out at about the same time. As it currently is, you run out of water. That's it. Everything else there is always plenty of. Things that require water, not so much.
And that's inherently stupid. The one resource that's 100% renewable in the world is not at all in the game. Oh, what an empty goose pond gets back like a couple bowls of water every 24 hours or something like that? I know it says on the wiki that it gets back water faster than that, but I think that's out of date info because I'll run by a town that's been dead for 24 hours and ponds all around it are still at super low level. So yea, not renewable. That's a joke.
Can we build groundwater reclamation ponds? Aqueducts? Irrigation ditches? Anything? Nope. Any town more than 24 hours old is constantly teetering on the edge of ruin over water supply. No ocean, no rivers, no streams, no lakes, no rain. We are all living in a desert wasteland world. Water is the only resource in ONE HOUR, ONE DROUGHT
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Still, noting is trolling us quite like horses "escaping" after like only five seconds, and then running spastically all over so far that it take 3-4 tries to catch it again. Seriously. I've found towns with the newest corpse being almost 2k years old and sheep that broke loose are still hanging out all within 20 spaces of the pen. Lose a horse and don't grab it instantly and within 30 seconds it can be so far away you'll never find it again even with a zoom mod backed out to max.
No town has died yet because it ran out of iron or soil. Even bell towns that last a week have lots of soil pits close enough around if you have a horse with cart. Every town dies over water before anything else is even close to exhausted. Either because someone killed all the Brown people and they can't get rubber, or the Gingers so they can't get oil. Or oil actually did run out (but that's rare).
So make all the hoes and till the soil. Don't worry about running out, you never will. Enjoy your town, it will most likely be dead by tomorrow. ONE DAY, ONE TOWN.
I second cotton. Or hemp even.
Hemp could be used to make rope or clothing, but not thread so milkweed or sheep would still be needed for sewing.
Hemp or Cotton should produce more per crop than milkweed, but take more skill to farm. Perhaps it would need to be watered twice, once mid growth period, like trees require. Or perhaps just must be harvested like carrots or it will rot/spoil if left too long.
Great. People are using leadership and hierarchy to organize mass murders. Fun.
Did anyone even see my message board suggestion? Not one comment. It would allow bigger orders to be issued but fast and direct communication would still require regular talking.
Do y'all think nobody would ever look at a message board? IDK. People sure don't seem to be able to resist the urge to pick up every map they see lying around.
Edit: nevermind it's 11 to switch leaders and 15 to have no leaders, both only in the condition of inheriting a leader. Doesn't make sense to me... Switch leaders sure, 11, but why the longer delay on flying solo?
I follow me
If that is allowed it would be what, ten to follow yourself?
unfollow
That would be eight?
Maybe such things should just be a /command that can be done at any age. You could unfollow by saying the words or doing the /command. Whichever way suits your fancy.
I like it, I think.
Would only the highest person in the chain be able to do this? Or would the guy at the bottom be getting messaged from a king, and a barron, and a duke, and a count, and etc, etc?
IDEA:
There should be a "message board" that can be built by players. When there are new messages a player hasn't seen it indicates that somehow visually. You would have to go check it and see what is being "ordered". It would display one message from each person above you. For instance you would click on the message board and a pop up would appear and say:
Your Queen Evelyn Smith wrote: Tom Winters is murdering people! Kill him on sight!
Your Duke Jasper Smith wrote: Yes, do as the king said. This guy just killed my mother.
Your Barron Bill Barbosa wrote: Can a ginger go the the pump and get some kerosene plz.
Your Lady Yvonne Durr wrote: Try not to die in the middle of town, the bones make a mess. Thanks!
So........
If you are in town, you can get messages quickly, but you still need to check the board. Players can ignore it if they want. If you are out in the wilderness running around, you will be out of the current news until you get back into a place with a message board. They don't have to be just in town. Along a road or anywhere. Maybe a message board would require some kind of basic maintenance once a day to avoid collapsing so there aren't message boards in every corner of every jungle and desert.
I think the extra clicks required to pick up bowl, then grab soil, then dump soil, then, drop bowl, then pick up hoe, then till, then drop hoe, then pick up bowl, then pick up more soil, the dump soil, then drop bowl, then pick up hoe, then till again, just to get to planting is a lot of annoying work.
instead of. Pick up bowl, grab soil, dump soil, grab soil, dump soil, drop bowl, pick up hoe, till soil, DONE.
Yea, I exaggerated a little. A sensible person would assembly line the process to do all of a stage before dropping bowl or hoe, but it's still extra clicks.
And, it wears out the hoe twice as fast too, which is annoying. That part could be balanced by just changing the number of expected uses I suppose.
I don't think players mind that this game is very very clicky. It just gets annoying when something is designed to take 10 clicks when the same thing could be done in 5 clicks. It makes sense for something complex I suppose, but I don't think farming is complex.
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P.S. - Do shoes really have to be separate? Like, why can't an item just be "pair of shoes". I know wearing one snakeskin boot and one wool bootie is all the fashion rage.....but still. At least can't like-kind shoes stack in a pile of two without having to use a basket?
I know in real life if you don't have a basket at home you have to keep one shoe in your bedroom and the other in the kitchen, but this is a just a game after all. Would anyone miss solving the mystery of, "Why is there one lone wooden clog in the sheep pen?"
EDIT: When you get shot with an arrow or stabbed one of your shoes should fly off and land somewhere up to 5 spaces away like Charlie Brown's shoes do when he gets knocked off the pitcher's mound by a line drive. If the shoe hits someone in the head there should be an audible "boink" sound and they should get a goose egg on their forehead for a minute.
I think that dogs mostly consist of pets these days. I could be wrong about that, but I think they are mostly useless, no matter how lovably useless, these days.
Do you think there is no such thing as trained working dogs currently?
So that means Tim Winter had been terrorizing two towns.
Yes, I put an end to him just north of the second town when he tried to flee after killing someone there.
I'd say have dogs attack and possibly kill anyone who stabs or shoots their master.
With hierarchies on the way, you could also set your dogs to attack anyone (within a range) who attacks one of your followers. Makes leaders more of something people would want and need. That was the classic relationship anyway, serf pledges fealty, the lord offers protection.
Dogs would not protect you if you had just murdered someone. They should be to aid defense, not protect those that commit offense.
This alone could bring the murder griefer problem completely under control.
And how would you kill someone who has dogs and is griefing in other ways? You could require elders to mark them for death, a marked person wouldn't get their dogs to defend them. Or you could kill their dogs first, could take some coordination with others if they have more than one dog. A king or above could have some way to mark someone for death. There could be many ways. I suspect most people that just try to steal babies or horses, or hide things won't go through all the effort to get a pack of dogs.
So I just got to witness a town wiped out and the Winter clan destroyed by one greifer killer. What follows is why the game often sucks.
1) The system to kill someone is awkward and clunky. It makes no sense. Sometimes you shoot, sometimes you don't. You always run around toward your target instead of just standing still. Killers use biomes to their advantage in this way. When you try to kill a murder greifer they hide in a biome you can't enter and you drop your weapon trying to even target them, Why? Because STUPID is why.
2) People who make killing all they do know how to better use this stupid awkward system. Average players don't. This gives killers an extreme advantage.
3) It takes tool slots to even use a weapon, which might make other players helpless. More advantage to the killers.
4) With all the confusion, language barriers, not being able to say many letters if you are young, all this plays to the killers advantage.
5) With a boundless world, is cursing even doing anything? People never curse someone unless they see them commit a crime, no matter what is reported. Most people who see the crime either can't curse at the time because they used theirs recently, don't know how, are too young, or just don't bother. A guy can wipe a town and maybe pick up two curses. Big deal! You're more likely to get cursed for picking up someone's rag hat they left in the middle of nowhere without asking.
For the record. I killed this guy. He was named Tim Winter. But the system is such a joke I couldn't do anything before he had already done his damage. Having to search the sea of junk for weapons, eventually having to go to another town to get bow and arrow. Took so long that in the end he's won. They always win, that's why they keep doing this. I imagine all these murder griefers are pre-pubescent fatties who suck hard at Fortnite. They don't play any game where others have a real chance to fight back because they have zero skills. Hey, if you want these losers to ruin your game that's your call Jason. People don't much enjoy being fish in a barrel.
That was pre-rift. Shortly after the arc system began, map seeds were made variable, and reset on any kind of apocalypse
That sounds right. I was in game when the Apocalypse happened. I was on a road. The road didn't just disappear, I jumped to an entirely new area. At first I thought some bug teleported me, sans all my items, to a random spot. I had coords for a bell city that used to be near, so I ran there and it was now in the middle of jungle. I know nobody had built a bell city in the middle of a jungle biome.
Because of this I didn't know the world seed reset. I thought maybe we all just got moved back closer to the origin point of the axis.
It would be nice if a family name could survive longer than on average twelve hours. It seems like a long time is one day. It seems they often meet their end due to murder greifers. They target a family and just kill any females, starting from the youngest.
The only "fix" to this I can think of is the game auto-cursing players for certain anti social detected behavior.
I was also thinking that. since you can't curse anyone if you're too young to type enough letters, when you die, the game could ask: WOULD YOU LIKE TO CURSE YOUR MURDERER? YES or NO? That isn't too crazy of an idea. I have been killed, reborn, aged up, and then cursed someone fifteen years after they murdered me. If my reincarnated spirit can curse someone from another body that is half way across the known world, I don't see why my spirit can't curse from the dark unknown between lives!
When the world reset, do we all appear back close to the true 0 , 0 coords and the Tarr monument?
Or are we still the same crazy distance west of the Tarr monument as we were before?
On the flip side of all this, I think it's bogus that you lose genetic score if you are born and your mother just leaves you to die and never even picks you up. She is the only one who should be losing genetic score.
It seems with the Eve spreading too fast bug fixed, many things are better! Towns were able to keep going, and actually keep growing. After about a day, the empty spaces did not feel completely barren anymore. You would see signs of others having passed before. Also we managed to make quite a bit of road and actually connected up a few larger thriving towns.
With the apocalypse triggered and a fresh world, I hope we actually see a city die actually because it's completely exhausted of resources, not just because everyone spawns 8k away from it.
I think we all know that east or south is the way to find others, but hold on.....
The Eve spawn "box" is only a 200 space max from north to south?! Basically only 5 ley lines? Why so few? That's another reason we've been moving way too far west if this is so.
And yea, we can't tell if we are in the Eve zone, so that might explain how I've run down a ley line for most of a life and found nothing. I thought the zig-zag of Eve spawing was about 1000 spaces total. 500 above the zero line and 500 below. It wouldn't feel so spread out if we were in the shape of a box, not a giant pancake.
I was thinking of something like a MAYOR. You'd have to build a building to serve as a town hall. You can then have some sort of election. The one with most votes is mayor. May can do things like list tasks for people to do. Like, I could see a list of who is doing what. No name listed as the town cook? OK I can do that. Once I die, my name automatically goes away and someone else can sign up for cook.
or
Mayor just assigns you a job. You don't have to do it, but if you do the assigned job maybe you see increased productivity. If you are assigned cook and you light an oven, it stays hot twice as long. If Mayor makes you a woodcutter, a tree you chop produces more wood, or your axe wears out slower. You don't have to do the job given, but if you do, you do it better.
Anyway, just ideas. Being a mayor, maybe is a way to automatically be reborn in a town. Or maybe a mayor loses all tool slots. They can't do anything, they have to delegate, but there can be a way for them to live way past 60 years. Get someone to sacrifice their life, you un-age whatever amount they had left? That would be an interesting dynamic.
I don't think survival to 60 is hard honestly. I make it to 60 almost every life unless 1) I get careless running through a pack a wolves and time my doges wrong. A wolf or even sometimes a boar gets me about one in twenty-fives lives, or so. Never had a bear eat me yet though! 2) Someone murders me or my mother just doesn't feed me. 3) I take a phone call, and get distracted and starve. Also rare.
So I don't think the survival aspect is hard and it confuses me to look at a family tree and see that almost everyone starves. I wonder if some are intentional after a female isn't fertile anymore? Not sure.
I don't even think the early game setup is that hard. It is a little challenging and fun.
Finally I don't think the "end game" is hard, if you want to call an advanced town the "end game". I do think it's harder than the other things I mentioned before. Not particularly for the individual, but it's super hard for the town because so many elements need to be juggled, and if any ball gets dropped it can spell doom, And meanwhile you have people trying to burn it all down in greater numbers that earlier stages. If you took out the greifer factor, maybe it would be just right.
But it isn't that its harder that's ruining the fun. The problem becomes it's so much work to just keep it going, there isn't time to do what you want to do anymore. Serious and knowledgeable players have to constantly struggle to support the town, and as soon as they aren't able, the town dies and it still has no reason to die yet. It's hard to communicate to others what they need to do. Water going dry so quick is a big part of this because if you can't fill buckets, half of the easy jobs most players only know how to do suddenly stop dead. Being so spread out is a problem because players that want to get back to a town to try to keep it alive can't. This leaves lots of people doing a SID as a baby just to try to get back, and that's bad too. Towns die way faster than a road can even get half way to connecting to anything. If at least roads could get connected maybe people could travel back and try to resurrect a dead town, but that's hard if it's now 5k away and you can't even find it!
And you know what, I'm fine with a town dying, if it's possible to get it resurrected, but with Eves moving westward at the rate they are, it's simply faster than it's possible to get back to abandoned towns. Seriously, after like only three days the new spawn area is already way beyond the distance nearly any player can realistically travel to get back, and expect anyone else to come.
And roads are way too slow to build. One long weekend I spent almost every life building a road trying to connect two bell towns. I played about 10 hours a day. For three straight days. Just building roads. Mostly by myself but often I got help. I barely got halfway before both towns died and the Eve spawn area was 8k away. Road building as it is now is an exercise in futility. Yes it can help a town a bit as it's easier to pull in surrounding resources and guide people into town, but if there is any intention to connect us, forget about it. And that's frustrating.
And what's so annoying about the speed of expansion is there is so much vast space just being jumped over. You can run along any ley line and cross dozens and dozens and dozens of untapped springs. No there should not be a settlement at every spring, but there should be more than one every 50, or 75 or whatever way high number it is.
Basically I think almost all these problems could be solved if we weren't spread out so much. So many ways to do that. Eve's could spiral in a "circle" and not just ever westward. Allow an eve to spawn in an area that has reset because nobody has been there for 7 days. Do something so family lines dont die out so darn easily so there are less Eves anyway. I'm sure there are others things too.
Part of the major problems with cities dying is that it seems life actually gets HARDER as the city gets bigger. It's more effort to get water. Its more work to get rope because all wild milkweed is gone, and it takes more soil to grow milkweed anyway, already making it a difficult crop. It's more work to get food. More difficult to get resources. Nothing gets easier really. I've almost starved in a big town. That's never happened out in the wilderness. It takes everyone more time to keep the basics running. There isn't enough time for enough people to make roads, or place waystones, or be a nurse or guard full time, or even pick up things that get dropped everywhere in a disorganized mess, much less bring back things lost out in the wilderness from people who just died in the middle of nowhere instead of bringing their items they were using back into town. The catch 22 is that a big town is needed to be able to do certain things, but what's the point if there just isn't time to do those things? Food bar needs to not go down so fast. Berry bushes need to be able to last longer without needing more water. An oven or a forge needs to burn a little more. Things like this. Things take two to three minutes of effort to make them operate for 15 seconds. It feels like so much grinding but there is never the payoff of being a "leet" character. You grind for 60 minutes and then die, and are completely reset, and the town you grinded on to build will be dead and gone in less than a week anyway. I don't see how you keep a game going that's always player grinding and never any payoff for it. It's all stick and no carrot.