One Hour One Life Forums

Hi everyone, I got the game recently and it's been a whole lot of fun!

I noticed that there seems to be a lot of discussion on the forums regarding how to encourage trade, so I thought I would give my thoughts. Some of these ideas are really drastic though!

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INCENTIVES TO TRADE: UNEVEN RESOURCE DISTRIBUTION

In my honest opinion, the only way to make long-distance trade work is an uneven distribution of resources.

The way the game currently is, the biomes are tiny and every village has access to virtually every biome and resource. It only takes a few steps to walk into the jungle for rubber and another couple into the tundra for oil. In theory, virtually every settlement is self-sufficient in their capacity to travel up the entire technology tree.

If settlements are self-sufficient, there is absolutely no reason to trade, and instead we get mega-cities.

INCREASING WATER SCARCITY WILL NOT LEAD TO MORE TRADE

The recent changes with regards to natural springs and wells is interesting, but it won't result in more trade.

Suppose you have one town with water and a nearby town that doesn't have water.

Making an essential resource (water) more scarce only encourages players to abandon and migrate away from the settlement when an essential resource is depleted.

The major point here is that trade needs to be bilateral in order to work. Each party must have something that the other party wants, and both parties must gain something from the trade.

PROPOSAL 1: DISTRIBUTE NON-ESSENTIAL DESIRABLE RESOURCES EXTREMELY UNEVENLY ACROSS THE WORLD

My suggestion is that non-essential resources need to be distributed far more unevenly in the game.

For instance, make bananas spawn in very dense and large clusters thousands of tiles apart. A majority of settlements won't have access to bananas, but a tiny minority will live in "banana heaven" swimming with bananas everywhere.

Honestly, I think the biomes should be far larger. I personally think it's quite silly that a village can sit within walking distance of all the biomes.

PROPOSAL 2: RECONSIDER WHAT AN "ESSENTIAL" RESOURCE IS

Currently, water scarcity drives a race up the water technology tree. It is impossible for a village to survive for long without advanced pumps, which implies that rubber, sulfur, and palm oil are currently all "essential" resources.

I saw another thread regarding "how fast is technology advancement too fast?", and I agree with the general point. Currently, the game forces villages to develop the equivalent of modern (e.g. diesel) technology or else face extinction. Consequently, virtually all settlements are under heavy pressure to advance from the stone age to the modern era in only a few generations.

I personally think this is too fast and too extreme.

In real life (history), primitive villages didn't exactly evolve technology out of necessity. Rather, in most cases technology evolved out of convenience. For instance, refrigerators were developed to extend the shelf life of food -- not because food is inedible otherwise.

In my opinion, technological advancement should increase the efficiency and ease that the game is played, and it shouldn't be mandatory for industries that are "essential" for the survival for a "primitive village."

Aboriginal Australians, Native Americans, First Nations peoples, and dozens of untouched tropical primitive societies have been able to persist for thousands of years even up to the 21st Century. In most cases, these cultures practice more environmentally sustainable habits than a majority of Western civilizations.

My request is for there to be some way that a "primitive village" can persist sustainably for many many generations, even in the absence of advanced technology. I think it would be nice if a majority of spawns as a player occurred in these types of villages.

I think that technological advancement should be more challenging, be a process that occurs over many generations, and require trade to progress.

However, I think that there should be some really powerful, fun, and cool rewards that come with successfully advancing technology. There are tons of possibilities!

* Electricity -- and everything that involves that makes modern life so nice, like refrigeration
* Plumbing
* Transportation of large quantities of stuff
* Increased life expectancy with better health

But the key thing is that technology advancement should be useful and beneficial!

Radios and cars are great...... but right now in the current game can we really say that they're useful?

PROPOSAL 3: CRAFTING TIME

One way to make technology advancement desirable is simply to increase the efficiency of advanced technology.

In OHOL, in my opinion, time is actually a really valuable resource.

To exploit this on the game development side, what if it took time to craft most things?

For instance: Before 1773, most cloth was produced by using a loom. However, John Kay's invention of the Flying Shuttle (which honestly isn't that complicated of a device) was able to greatly accelerate the speed that a single weaver could make cloth. Eventually, the Flying Shuttle was made obsolete by even better technology that made cloth production even faster.

A similar thing could be said about the Drop Spindle. It's actually possible to spin wool by hand, and in fact some cultures in the world have historically spun such textiles by hand. However, hand spinning is quite slow and laborious.

Durability is already implemented in OHOL, and it's quite easy to conceptualize that modern textiles are higher quality and more durable than ancient ones.

So what if advanced technology increased the speed/efficiency/ease/quality that things are done?

PROPOSAL 4: MAKE MORE REDUNDANT RECIPES FOR ESSENTIAL RESOURCES

This is especially relevant if biomes become larger and environments are drastically different from village to village, but generally speaking I think it's a good idea to have multiple recipes that produce a single product that is essential for village life.

For instance, I can think of at least a dozen ways to make rope from different natural materials (I researched this as a hobby some time ago), and it might be nice to reflect this. Rope can be made from hemp, cotton, linen, straw, tree bark (yes, tree bark!), tree roots, vines, among other things. There are tons of survival enthusiast resources online, and rope is an essential survival tool that can be made almost anywhere in the world.

That said -- not all rope is equal -- any rope will break under a certain amount of tension, so I doubt that straw rope will be good enough for a 100-lb bow. However, straw rope is good enough for something like making baskets. In fact, many modern synthetic ropes exist precisely because we needed rope that can support higher tension in special applications.

I have no idea how this might be implemented without going too crazy, but I just wanted to illustrate a few points.

I really like how both reeds and straw can be used to make baskets.

Can we have more of this?

PROPOSAL 5: BLUEPRINTS FOR TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT

This is the craziest suggestion.

The current rate of technological advancement is too fast (in my opinion).

Here I propose a system to limit the rate of technological advancement through:

A) Requiring trade to advance technology
B) Requiring Blueprints to produce advanced technology

Both of these will put temporary "ceilings" on the maximum degree of technology a settlement can reach before something special has to be done.

The concept behind "Blueprints" is that most people don't know how to make advanced machines.

I don't know how to make a diesel engine in real life, and I doubt that most ordinary people do. However, if I had the Internet -- in other words, a "Blueprint" or a recipe -- explicitly describing how to make a diesel engine step-by-step, I might have better luck.

In the current game, it's a bit silly that a five-year-old child can walk out of the nursery and start building an Newcomen Engine immediately like they were somehow magically born with the knowledge.

Under the proposed Blueprint system, players must read a Blueprint in their lifetime before they are capable of making advanced technology.

Blueprints are written on paper (which would be very expensive prior to the invention of the Printing Press), and they could be transported around from town to town (thus encouraging trade). Traveling blueprints would encourage technological revolution to occur in waves -- i.e. the Industrial Revolution.

In the absence of a Blueprint, the next level of technology would have to be researched using a Prototype. It would take a long time and a lot of effort (a few generations) before a Prototype could be completed successfully. Once a prototype is initially completed, a Blueprint could be made.

Here's an example:

Suppose that a Newcomen Atmospheric Engine is considered an Advanced Technology that requires Blueprints to produce. Player 1 lives in Village A, and Village A lacks any blueprint for a Newcomen Engine. Player 1's options are to:

1). Go traveling to find a village/town that already has a blueprint.
2). Start building a prototype -- however, this is very tedious, requires special rare ingredients for research (thus encouraging trade/travel), and won't be completed for many generations.

Skip ahead to Generation 5, and finally a Newcomen Engine Prototype is completed.

It is now up to the town to make as many copies of the Blueprint as possible and distribute it to other towns, in order to immortalize this technology. However, Blueprints are expensive to make, and a single primitive village might only have the resources to make a few copies.

Meanwhile -- this is the cool part -- there is the constant pressure of Griefers who will try to be as destructive as usual. They might try to hide Blueprints to cause important technology to be lost, and Blueprints might decay when left on the ground, but this only makes it more important for Grandma Sue to make sure that she physically passes on an important Blueprint to a trustworthy grandchild.

Thoughts?