a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I like the idea and I'm curious how it will play out, but there are clearly some issues with the current implementation. Particularly getting rubber for the newcomen well. Towns are also too spread out to make trade reasonable. You can spend half your lifetime searching on horseback and only find abandoned eve camps. If you're lucky you might find a town a thousand tiles away. At the very least one other town would have to be within reasonable walking distance.
Part of the problem is that tools used for trading require trading to begin with. Horses for travel and transport. Rubber to make erasers for reusable notes. With how many items and recipes are in the game there are going to be things forgotten too. Only desert people can dye clothing, and only jungle people can wear yellow or green for example. Items used for minor recipes that now become effectively impossible without that specialty.
Hungry work is intended to discourage griefing. It's there so someone doesn't just chop all the trees or break all the walls with the click of a button. That's great. People shouldn't be able to tear walls down so easily. They shouldn't be able to just kill all the sheep either. If they're a little committed it's not that hard to take a walk and kill all the nearby mouflon then hide any bows or arrows too.
Even if they don't bother with wild animals killing all the sheep is still a very very easy way to hamstring the town. It basically sets them back to a primitive state at that point. After the basic berry farm and shallow well are built sheep are right behind. There's no more renewable soil or clothing until you do. People start walking around naked and the farm starts to die. It's not that trivial compared to putting some walls back up, and anyone with a knife can do it in five seconds flat.
Most of the time you can just sit behind a maple and zoom out
A very, very small minority of players use mods. I make a point not to because it's cheating. Your response here is to cheat and spend every life guarding the sheep pen. Either that, build it outside of town or make it gated so access is heavily restricted. None of these are reasonable solutions. Slaughtering sheep should be hungry work.
Isn't it pretty trivial to put stone walls back up? I understand that it's a chore to fix but the stone is still there in the same spot. Just lay stakes and set it back up. Killing all the sheep is much more harmful. I had a whole town just give up and die today because some 10 year old kid slaughtered all the sheep. The mutton you get already multiplies your investment of some berries and a carrot even if it doesn't go into a pie. You get poop for compost and fleece for clothing too. It's arguably the most important thing to a town next to the well and you can't really grief a well. At least not with the effortless ease of clicking on a few sheep.
Might help make shepherd a proper job in this tool slot update, and restore the meta of leaving a sheep unsheared to improve efficiency
Hungry work for smashing stone walls
Hungry work for slaughtering sheep.
Jusef and Blossom Giovanni. Two people from another family. Jusef wandered into town and happened to finish an approved gate for the community garden's fenced in area. He got chased out and came back with Blossom, a knife and baskets full of pie. They barricaded themselves inside while we stood guard at the gate. When they ran out of food Jusef stripped naked and greased himself up before running to our bakery for more food. Slippery little guy. When he returned an unarmed family member stumbled in through their gate. We had a tense hostage negotiation in gibberish. Stuff does still happen and you can find other families.
In general everyone's a lot more spread out though. Exploration feels much more like before the rift. You could go a thousand tiles searching along fault lines before you find another town. Or sometimes they're a few biomes over just past the edge of the spring tapout. I don't think it's that boring.
On the east side of the farm there is a row of boxes. The top one holds a diesel engine and it's locked. The town's well is using a newcomen pump, but don't worry. They have an engine ready to go. All you have to do is pick that lock, right?
I've lived several lives in this town recently and it's been annoying me every time. The box with the engine is impossible to open.
Don't get me wrong I've picked locks before. Grab your chisel and file, make a lock and key. Lock something, file the key, there's your lock pick. It doesn't work on this box. "Lock removal key - A." Okay. Maybe a griefer made a whole bunch of lock sets and this one is lock removal key - B or C. So I made more boxes, more locks, more keys. No combination of installing locks or filing keys worked. It's impossible to open that box holding the engine.
Is there something I'm missing here or is it just a bug? I didn't want to make a thread for this but it's driving me nuts not knowing.
I'm always over 40 genetic score. In the top 20 leaderboard.1 That's 3 bonus tool slots according to the UI. I always max out, usually fairly early in life. It happens naturally just taking care of chores. Making clothing or some missing tools. Heating something on coals, in an oven or kiln. There are so many tools that it happens naturally just living your life. There's never a dedicated smith, shepard, baker etc. People play the same as before and just find themselves limited.
Newer players never learn more than a couple tools. Older players are hamstringed. I had to finish and install a diesel engine to replace an exhausted newcomen well recently. Despite bonus slots it used almost all of my tools. The town also desperately needed compost, carrots, pies etc.
I couldn't do anything so I taught my noob son what he wanted. Hunting. He used maybe two tool slots, lost a bow and didn't contribute anything in his life. Noobs use no slots and vets need more. The game doesn't really work without fixers. Often addressing one problem isn't enough. Usually, people don't address any problems at all.
If I'm in a primitive camp with no well and dry springs I bail because I don't see any point in struggling to keep an unsustainable settlement going. You can draw from ponds while you build a cistern and horse cart to carry water from far off ponds but it's just not worth it to me. Some people love playing at being eve but to me it's just a boring grind. Wandering around gathering items to build the same simple toolset and infrastructure every time.
So usually I bail and try to find a friendly village with a well that my children can settle down in. Usually from a very young age so I can hopefully get there before baby time. If I'm a boy I'll stick around to help out for a little while then go exploring when I'm older. Typically near the end of my life I'll return to the primitive camp to see how it's doing and find it abandoned, with my mother and siblings bones lying around. I've never found one still surviving.
Mutton pie is good cuz it's cheap and nutritious
A lot of people think that's all that matters. The stuffing for your berry carrot pie for example could have been used to feed a sheep and make FOUR!! glorious mutton pies. Can't you see you're just wasting food??
Personally I think it's more fun to make a variety of foods, and the yum mechanic is a great incentive for that.
"Don't shear the last sheep" is some classic ohol wisdom. Feed the babies and grow your sheep population instead. This is mostly true in young villages.
Usually there's plenty of mutton and overpopulating the sheep pen just causes clutter. Take the example in the OP. Feed 5 sheep to make a sweater or work the loom. What are you going to do with 20 pieces of mutton? Where are you going to put them all? Clog up two full slot boxes in the bakery with nothing but meat? It's more efficient but the volume of meat becomes a problem of storage and organization, and that's with just 5 sheep being butchered. If everyone left the last sheep and only fed babies you'd be drowning in mutton.
You could spend your whole life making dozens of mutton pies to keep everyone fed and it would be a pretty efficient use of resources. It's fine if people don't though.
karltown_veteran wrote:He’s the only OHOL youtuber who’s been able to make me laugh.
Twisted: ;-;
This bad boy.
Not ideal...
Get others to curse them with you. If you get a few really active people to curse them who play the same hours as you, you probably won't see them again for a week.
I have had to pick up pads to stop people from healing in past or hide pads
Cursing is the same way though. Helpful idiots jump on the bandwagon and curse innocent players along with the griefer. Even if you hide pads a doctor will come running to heal both of you and delay the problem. They're being covert about sabotaging the town so you have to be even more covert about saving it. Otherwise you just look evil yourself. There's no way to win.
How do you deal with griefers and murderers? Killing them doesn't work, a helpful idiot will heal them then revenge kill you. Telling people doesn't work because nobody cares. Even with supporters you just end up dying together.
It just makes me want to join the griefer squad and give back what everyone is gifting me. Lock all the doors, lure bears into town, hide essential tools. If the game is about griefing I should get in on it too.
Alright, so barrels are large items that can be picked up and carried when empty. Made from planks and two rounds plus rope. Works exactly like a crock. Put in a bowl of wheat plus a bowl of water then heat on simmering coals to make beer. Take an empty bowl to the barrel to drink. Feeds maybe 6 pips and prevents tool use for 10s, which maybe stacks for each drink in a row. Maybe it also extends your speech limit during this timeframe. We can mix different ingredients in the barrel to produce a couple other drinks too. Building a distiller attachment which turns it into some stronger spirits for example.
The beer would be a low-tech low-investment food source. Doesn't feed many pips but it's useful for chaining yum and is easy to produce. It disincentives work while enabling the player to chat more effectively. It might seem like a recipe for a town full of lazy drunks, but hard workers will resent that and the population will police itself. On the other hand, it's a recipe for strong communication in an update that promotes cooperation. Set up a few barrels in the middle of town and watch the rumor mill work. Spend some time at the pub advertising for a woodcutter and one will appear. Let people know about that suspicious kid running around with a bow or that stranger on the edge of town. Recruit an assistant to help with the building project you're working on. It would be nice to have even a few more characters to type with instead of trying to work out a deal through clipped bits of text.
This constant trend of reducing what the player can do and constraining their world and experience is poor game design. You don't make a fun game by making the player weak, you do it by empowering them. 'You can only do X' is one thing, 'you're THE BEST at X' is another.
Outside of eve camps living to 60 is pretty much guaranteed for any decent player so personally it probably won't affect me much, since genetic fitness is very easy to grow. It would be nice to have some tradeoff in return for this restriction though. Assign a value that reduces tool wear the more you use something for example. The smith never breaks his hammer, gravekeeper can bury everyone with one shovel, etc. A journeyman lumberjack's work is half as hungry.
Neither one of these would really work in practice since they're messing with the iron grind and anti-griefing mechanics respectively but you get the point. If you're going to force people to specialize at least give that expertise some kind of bonus. I like that it encourages new players to learn a job though.
The latest arc has been going for a little over 2 hours at this point. I've spent a lot of that exploring the map. The corners are all poor spots for towns and every single spring is dried up. So far I've found two wells. One is placed randomly in the middle somewhere in a dead eve camp. The other is in a town along the west wall and is dried up with no crops available. Just before I died two bears appeared in town so I'm not expecting good results. I also found maybe 8-10 camps that were running successfully but had their spring dry up before they could complete their well and were ultimately doomed.
With even the most basic sustainable water resources so limited in availability it seems like the only way to stand a chance of settling anywhere is to dig on the first spring you find as soon as possible and try to make it work from there. Right now most people are just wandering around the wilderness because all you can really do is try to find one of the few wells.
I like his passion but I think that development priorities have become a little misguided since the introduction of the rift. This focus on restricting resources and balancing the game around that seems wrong. Wasn't this supposed to be a civ building game? What happened to the nuclear powered robots? Ever since oil was introduced everything stagnated. Especially now with the rift, even if people wanted technology it's too time and resource intensive to bother with. We're back to the iron age with the occasional diesel engine being built strictly for resource gathering.
In a developed town pre-rift players had some choice in what they -want- to do. Want to make a cool outfit and dye your clothes? Sure. Want to learn how to make ice cream or fries and ketchup? Have fun! Research new technology so you can build a car or a radio. Maybe next update you can turn that car into a steam roller and build roads more efficiently. Maybe you'll be able to construct buildings more easily, maybe you can attach a furnace so they're always warm.
To me the game was supposed to be about advancing the development of your community through increasingly complex technology. The crafting menu expands, player knowledge expands along with it and technology makes the game more fun for everybody. It's about expanding your options and availability of resources through player and community development. The rift is the complete opposite of that.
The question you posit now has me as a strict vanilla user curious. Am I unconsciously bored with the game because of the view? If I were to install the zoom mod, then would I become a gushing fanboy/fangirl of Jason's creation? These are heady thoughts indeed. I'll have to ponder them a while.
The obvious answer is that yes, cheating is more fun than playing fair.
Games are usually more fun when you can cheat to make them easy.
Wool hat, sweater and booties with a gender-appropriate skirt or pants ideally. All dyed one matching color, usually blue. I know it's very inefficient resource wise but I like it. A lot of the time I spend my childhood feeding sheep to put together an outfit and if possible I always try to dye it.
Then when I'm old I try to find a kid that knows what they're doing and I pass it down. They're usually really thankful for the sweet kit so I like to ask them a favor in return. Either burying me somewhere or completing a mission for the good of the town. Upgrading the well or building a cistern, getting a cow or something.
Other favorites include the straw hat (MUST have a turkey feather), froot boots, sealskin coat and reed skirt. I don't like wearing plain skins usually, sheepskin, mouflon hide etc. The wooden clogs are sort of mediocre too, they're blocky and hard to match color wise.
Welcome to the new battle royale game mode.
The high player density makes this game really REALLY unfun. It's not even about raiders. I find gate griefers in nearly every town. People who refuse to pass on gate rights and leave everyone else either trapped inside or locked outside of town. Even if you ask nicely, they just stand there and stare. The only way to deal with it is to murder every owner in succession and then anyone trying to build a new gate. If you manage to survive that and clear out the gate griefers you then have to deal with periodic raiders making suicide missions.
Heck, maybe being trapped in a murderbox for your entire life is a good thing though. If you manage to make it outside to gather resources you'll just be murdered immediately. By a cheater with a modded game, who can see you from a mile away and shoot you before they're even on your screen. Cramming everyone together into a tiny area like this turns the game from a relaxed civ builder into an experience where hell is other people and it's standing room only.
bear lurers like the idea of making bows rare.
This is a very good point.
Bows are also a prerequisite for basic civilization. They gatekeep sheep, and also files. Files in turn gatekeep the saw, which is necessary for building buckets and deep wells. Changing bows would effectively change the entire primitive tech tree. It's a vital tool.
I've been mostly staying away while the game is updated. Today I decided to play several lives. Some things have become apparent.
One, people are too close together. It's common to see multiple people from different families in a lifetime. Towns have resorted to walling themselves off with fences to keep dangerous foreigners out. The one life I lived in a town without a fence a single foreigner with a war sword murdered literally everyone in my family. In fact most of my lives today ended up with murder. Previously I nearly always lived to die of old age.
Two, with the immediate proximity of hostile outsiders leaving town is VERY dangerous. One life I lived to 40 before realizing I didn't even know where the gate *was* in town. It's forcing people to become hermits because leaving town turns the game into battle royale mode.
Three, because of this induced hermetic lifestyle resources outside of town are abundant. Nobody goes out to scavenge and the people that do very often die. The first time I left town I was murdered immediately. It was so close that I walked back and died at the gate. Resource competition within the rift isn't about the resources, it's about territory. It's not a question of scarcity it's one of patrolling your territory and killing all trespassers on sight.
This is still better than when the rift was first introduced, but it's still drastically changing the tone of the game to be about paranoia and war.
Not really the cozy cooperative ciz building game that most of the player base signed up for, with this hostile kill-on-sight attitude.
I think I read something on the OHOL discord about peace treaties being in the works. Don't know the details but I imagine it's something like one elder writing a note with a pre-determined phrase that the game recognizes (like how naming works) then saying "I agree" or something. If elders over 50 from both families agree they become tagged as 'family' by the system. Presumably disabling use of war swords and allowing curses or something like that.
Age works really well as a gatekeeping method here because it prohibits players under a certain age to use long phrases by default. Similar to how kids can't curse or name anyone until they grow up. It also maximizes the amount of investment that a player has in their family by limiting use of peace treaties until you've already spent almost an hour in that community. So it's not just anyone that can make a peace treaty, it's someone with a more concrete interest in their family.
I'm not sure how the treaty would be broken though, maybe something like geographic speciation. One of the families dies out in town and if distant survivors don't interact with the other family for a certain amount of time they become unrelated foreigners again. Anyway, I think a mechanic for officially joining two friendly families would help a lot in promoting diplomacy. The way it is now you can never -really- trust a foreigner.
A chef. Not some lowly peasant baker, a real chef that makes only the yummiest foods. Shrimp, tacos, burritos, fries and chips with ketchup and salsa. Ice cream! Turkey, sauerkraut, milk and mango. I'll try to expand the town's food options and encourage my children to learn about making at least one new kind of food in their life.