a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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We found the answer to the arc-end-is-boring problem: build shroom plantations everywhere
Kinrany, your solution would help to make the puzzle different for each arc.
It wouldn't mitigate the "prodigy baby" thing from life to life, nor help to make family abilities unique, nor encourage trade.
I believe it would solve the "prodigy baby" problem.
Item names and sprites would be randomized per baby, not per arc. Alice would say "I need a Surgical Resistor", but Bob would hear "I need a Space Inhalator".
The best way to record the recipe would be just laying the required items in a row behind a fence. Though there could be pictograms for drawing the items on paper in a consistent way.
This would certainly have the consequence of different families having different knowledge. It would also encourage trade, but only because knowledge is easier to hide or destroy.
It's interesting. I'm tempted to ask Jason to just give us the tools we want and then make them sufficiently hard to use that the game is still interesting. But it only works well with crafting. It doesn't work with information technology at all, because with good IT communication problems would just disappear.
This is crazy and great.
The chance to hear someone's thought could be logarithmic, so that sometimes you hear even people from other villages, but you can't really communicate with them.
Dantox, how would it fit into the current crafting system?
Crafting could be a puzzle: suppose there are ten different shapes that can be made of wood, and each tool takes five of them combined in the correct order. All the other combinations are craftable, but result in useless pieces of art instead of useful tools. And the correct recipes are randomized each ark. This way people would have to record and teach successful recipes, and also record the artwork to make sure they don't try the same combination again.
Edit: the names and sprites of the wooden shapes could be randomized every life and be different for every character. Just like coordinates are relative to the birth location, not absolute. This way you wouldn't even preserve the knowledge between lives.
New meta: lots of tiny fenced airports all over the map
Not all content is equal, though. Rust's electricity system alone has more potential for player to explore than all of OHOL's content. In general there's a lot more return on investment when you give players building blocks that can interact with eachother, that's what made Minecraft so huge and is the reason behind Factorio's success. You've kinda designed yourself into a corner with prohibiting interactions between objects on different tiles. Yeah, it'd be a huge amount of work to change that now, but the payoff would be that any content you add would stay fresh a lot longer.
It should be good enough to have complex interactions that only happen on a single tile.
After all, full automation is boring: you win by not doing anything at all. Semi-automation is fine though: you still have to do something, and you can automate the parts that are boring anyway. So all the parts that involve multiple tiles can be done by a player.
I think when players demand more content, they do imply mechanically unique content like and would quickly start complaining about reskins
On Reddit writing so much wouldn't matter because word salad would just get downvoted to hell
I built this into my mod and it is quite nice.
Also works for suggesting valid names for eves/babies
Do you know if the original idea can also be implemented as a mod? Or does filtering happen on the server?
I'm afraid that the game is now trying to engineer a stage play from start to end, instead of creating an interesting situation and just letting it develop in unexpected ways.
It'd be convenient if we could say someone's name, and they would see a more noticeable speech bubble.
IRL everyone is trained to recognize their name even when they're not paying attention to the conversation.
For example, Alice says "Bob, give me that basket". Bob is too far to hear that normally, but because Alice mentioned Bob by name, he will still see a notification at the edge of the screen, and it'll be highlighted with a different color.
Jason, you justified using the US-sourced names by saying that it has lots of names from other countries anyway. But now you're using US statistics to decide which names are male and which are female, and that clearly will not generalize well to other countries.
Frankly, I see no reason whatsoever to enforce this. At the risk of being uncharitable, it seems you just thought it was cool that the data was available, and really wanted to find a way to use it.
Instead of hardcoding structures, the game could reuse random parts of player-made structures from previous arcs.
What happens after you hit the top of the tech tree?
Serious answer: you start inventing games. (Because once you have no external goals, anything you choose to do would be playing a game, by definition)
Maybe the problem with war swords is that right now it's cheaper for a lineage to kill any other lineage on sight. It should be more viable to invest in being prepared for war but peacefully interacting with those who also want peace.
Given that the game is multiplayer, I wonder if observing a town or a building instead of a single player would make it easier to spot overarching problems.
The specific mechanics seem to have a few problems.
They ignore descendants that will be born after you die.
They ignore relatives who are not descendants. (We do care about our aunts and uncles.)
More generally, they're pretty complex and abstract. Evolution isn't: it's just that some genes have better odds of existing in bigger number in the future.
Players shouldn't be trying to increase a number. They should have exactly the same goal as genes: make more people with the same genes. Genetically-related-people-as-spawn-points and genetic-relatedness-as-weight-of-good-thing-happening seem like good approximations.
But eh, that's details, not very important. I'm looking forward to exploring this new world of players genuinely pretending to care about each other.
Hahahahahahaha, I've been waiting for this for a while.
Next step: find a way to overcome the bullshit genetic programming in our heads and do something we actually want instead of doing what our genes want us to do.
Best update ever
Each person could have different temperature tolerance. So you'd be able to catch rabbits in foreign biome, but it'd cost more than trading.
Games are a pretty good solution to this problem, no?
Besides, even once we have AI, there'll still be other people, and we'll still have conflicts with other people.
The hubris to think that things were terrible for the last two hundred thousand years, then suddenly got good in the last fifty.
Some would say that things are still terrible.
You could have multiple features like that behind feature flags that are being disabled/enabled from time to time at random
It would also be hard for players to reason about (no longer would last name alone be a sufficient marker).
What's the problem? Just tell them exactly what you want them to know. "Uncle"/"No relation", "25% relation" would work just fine.