a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
You are not logged in.
Regarding the weakness of a game that "needs griefers" to be interesting.... this game is inspired in part by Rust, so, yeah. Human interactions and conflicts are way more interesting than interactions with the environment or a crafting tree. I wouldn't say griefing is the goal exactly, but conflicts between people are going to occur, and they are interesting! Griefing is the most extreme form of this.
Griefing is also the only visible form of this right now, isn't it?
Perhaps you should add a reason to have serious conflicts. Then solving griefing would be just a special case of dealing with spies.
Curse system is fundamentally broken because all the cursed players share the same consequences. It is effectively a ban, but the punishment is determined by random players that know nothing about the crime.
Two alternatives:
1) "Bless you" as a way to mark players you like. Will make it easier to trust players. Personal whitelist instead of shared blacklist.
2) "I owe you" as a way to remember to thank players later, in another life.
Joriom.... I'm not trying to make the game idiot-proof. I mean, people have power in this game to make bad decisions. And tales of redemption are dramatic and interesting, so I get why people would be tempted to raise a marked baby.
Ooh, I know a quote that is relevant here:
"Was the sixth-year Slytherin seriously hurt?" said Harry.
"Yes."
"Was the sixth-year Gryffindor raised by Muggles?"
"Yes."
"Is Dumbledore refusing to expel him because the poor boy didn't know?"
Professor Quirrell's hands whitened on the inkwell. "Do you have a point, Mr. Potter, or are you just stating the obvious?"
"Professor Quirrell," said Harry gravely, "all the Muggle-raised students in Hogwarts need a safety lecture in which they are told the things so ridiculously obvious that no wizardborn would ever think to mention them. Don't cast curses if you don't know what they do, if you discover something dangerous don't tell the world about it, don't brew high-level potions without supervision in a bathroom, the reason why there are underage magic laws, all the basics."
"Why?" said Professor Quirrell. "Let the stupid ones die before they breed."
"If you don't mind losing a few sixth-year Slytherins along with them."
Cursing is the new initiation ritual
Relevant: The bigger biomes idea
This should be a feature
Most of the time, big civilizations that think they're fine and running smoothly ARE NOT.
Berry patches are a great example. Berry farming (well, farming of any sort, but berries most of all) needs a constant influx of soil - so you need a working compost farm. Which means you need a berry farm, a carrot farm (that people don't eat all the carrots from), a wheat farm (that people don't just thresh without replanting first since the seeds dissipate), and a sheep pen. And all of that needs to be healthy and in working order - you can't try to make compost when things are already dying; it takes too many berries.
Big civilizations tend to run out of water. So there needs to be further exploration to find more. I'm not sure what the long-term plans are for pipes, but right now, wells run dry and then people have to rely on the hope of well regeneration or bringing in water from far away to fill cisterns.
Big civilizations start to get excited about roads and railroads - but don't seem to know where they're building them TO. Another food area? Another water area? Or are they just building for the sake of building??
See what the civilization is lacking. See where the edges of the town are and what biomes are not well represented. What resources are missing? What can help? Yes, berries... but a toddler can tend berries. Go harness a horse or build more carts so the civilization can expand. Stockpile medic supplies ready for the next bear or griefer attack. Think about ways to advance the city, rather than ways the city can just... subside.
If the civilization is dying, one individual won't be able to save it like this. Organizing the road builders to find water and build a road there would help, but in three generations no one will remember that the road exists for that reason, and the civilization will die anyway. Solving a problem once is not enough.
If you don't have a role, there are other people who also don't have one. Make sure they do, and then make yourself replaceable, so that it won't all fall apart when you're dead.
People were literally just having kids to send them between villages to stab each other.
Sounds fun
What would be super neat, but probably a total headache to implement would be if the text would decay gradually, with characters smudging out every so often.
Single ID per text no matter how many copies there are is great for mass producing pamphlets
But if books were to decay, say a book becomes ragged after a few epochs or something, then there would need to be some way of recording which unique book this is, and which book type it is.
Books could just randomly tear when used. Make copies if you don't want to lose useful information.
(What kind of information would you have to store in books though?)
(Recording prophecies?)
Now that there are roads, there should be a good reason to make them really long.
Paper decays too, right?
For more advanced tech crafting is the introduction of a right-hand left-hand control.
Two hands -> item manipulation with hotkeys -> crafting takes less time
Yay!
Antinatalists would love this game.
OP didn't say anything about babies not knowing what to do. Half the replies in this thread are irrelevant because it's possible to be the most experienced player in the world and still be useless.
What's wrong with small updates?
(Not a rhetorical question. For example, it would be annoying to get an email about every bug fix.)
Ahh, hauling specialists, the heroes all Dwarf Fortress-like societies need, but none deserve.
Originality, by Piet Hein
Original thought
is a straightforward process.
It's easy enough
when you know what to do.
You simply combine
in appropriate doses
the blatantly false
and the patently true.
Reminds me of Alastair Reynolds' Pushing Ice. An asteroid mining spacecraft is thrown far forward in time and captured by an alien megastructure. It's basically a gigantic space zoo at the end of time, populated with members of other spacefaring civilizations that were captured in a similar way. And the only two ways they can get energy to sustain themselves are raiding other spaceships and cannibalizing the megastructure.
I feel like this should be added into the main game in some form, or at least modded in.
For one baby survival would be easier (at least at first), kids would not be kids anymore and mortality rate would be significantly slashed intially and boost population without there being any real work involved. Secondly if a baby instantly becomes an adult upon being named this gives griefers almost instantaneous ability to grief without people having even gotten a chance to observe them for a while and come to their own conclusions.
Also if a girl baby instantly becomes an adult that means she's also likely to instantly start spewing out babies, so whilst babies becoming adults makes things easier short term it also has the disasterous effect of too much population growth too soon meaning the whole settlement will likely starve pretty quickly because of baby booms.
The game being generally easier is only a quantitative change that could be balanced away just by tweaking variables.
Griefers being able to grief instantly is the mother's fault. Instant adulthood just makes the choice between aborting the baby and letting it live more explicit. The mother doesn't have to name it right away.
Besides, babies not being able to act right away is not supposed to prevent griefing. Doesn't it feel wrong that removing childhood is so unimportant by itself that enabling griefing is the worst that could happen?
You're right, it makes sense that placebo effects could work for purely neurological issues. Like raising one's own pain tolerance by ignoring pain until one actually stops noticing it.
Can't check [23] and [27] because they're paywalled. [33] seems to be based on self-reports.
No, I meant they are ridiculous because they would totally change everything.
How?
Curses ARE real as long as cursed person knows about being cursed and believes that it works. Placebo effect can and has been measured.
AFAIK placebo effect is mostly statistical artifacts and flawed research.
(Shamelessly off topic since the thread is too old anyway.)
Yes, both changes are obviously ridiculous. My point is that they're mostly thematic, they don't really change the core dynamics. If these changes are ridiculous and at the same time they don't really change much, it means that something is already broken.
Kinrany, we "communicate responsibility" in real life---via ownership---with nothing more than locks, walls, and keys. There aren't magic labels on things that declare ownership. Something is owned if it is locked down.
I'm not sure I understand. People quite literally label their stuff IRL (with a name and a phone number) when there's a chance it will get lost.
There's also verbal communication and social conventions. You can stay close and shout "ITS MINE" if you leave your stuff on a table and someone grabs it. And everyone knows that the stuff in the shop belongs to the shop owner.
Restricting access physically has a cost, so of course there are situations where that cost is higher than the alternatives. (And sometimes it's cheaper to not own the thing in the first place.)
Ownership is itself a social convention. You don't need the idea of ownership to use locks and keys to protect your stuff. If Trace the Larcener can't get your stuff, it doesn't matter that they understand that it's yours.
And another thing: in all but the most simple cases we don't really own objects. (Objects don't really exist anyway.) We own decisions. The queen doesn't really own the country, she's merely allowed to give orders to her ministers.
Locks, walls and inheritance solve a different problem. They help with security, and this post is about communicating responsibilities.
Not arguing that you should change priorities, just pointing out that these two issues are mostly unrelated.