a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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The reasoning behind intention-based combat in ohol is that skill-based combat gives skilled players power over unskilled players. Intention-based combat is fair: everyone get one vote. That's the idea of a posse. This idea failed in practice, so now we have the exile system. Which still gives skilled players power over less skilled players, it's just about gene score rather than mechanical skill.
Nobody:
Absolutely no-one:
Jason: "saying the n-word is perfectly okay."
You can sit at your desk all day, just put the desk in front of a window.
:smirk:
Ironically if I get a new player notification I put absolutely minimal investment into the baby. "You are Newana" (you are new) then chuck them on the fire and walk away. Maybe give them a mouflan hide and straw hat but never actual clothing or backpacks. The idea is that nicer items would be wasted on them since they don't know how to use a backpack and would starve regardless of kit. Likely outside of town where the items may get lost. Better to let them learn the basics of eat-food-don't-starve before giving them the good items. It may seem silly but new players WILL starve regardless of food scarcity, just because they often leave eating til the last second, don't recognize food for what it is or don't know how to eat it. Stuff like stew and turkey that you can't just click on to eat foils them and they starve while trying to figure it out.
Even if you have an evil baby, feed and clothe them. They're still your baby.
The basics of parenting are to keep your baby alive until they're three years old and to give them any clothes or backpacks lying around. Never expect a baby to F for food, always actively feed them. If the town is short on clothing you can share some of yours with your children, but you don't have to. That's going the extra mile and nobody should expect it. Obviously name the baby and feel free to talk to it, don't bother trying to understand babyspeak if they try talking back though. At age three drop them off in the berry patch, wish them luck and tell them to have fun.
If they come to you for help with something it's good to try if you can, think of them being on the same 'team' as you. The same goes for babies- if mom is working on something and asks you to help out with some minor chore like baking or gathering firewood it's nice to help out since she took the time to feed you. In the same vein, don't be afraid to ask mom for help. Teaching is part of mom's responsibilities too. If they seem busy, try asking someone who's doing a thing you want to learn. Try not to be too greedy though. A few minutes of teaching is no problem, but don't expect people to spend 30+ minutes going over every little detail. Take some initiative and try to study up on onetech.info for recipes beforehand.
Sudden infant death in ohol is a way for players to have a minimum amount of control over their circumstances. If someone wants to be born a boy so they can work on a project without interruptions, if someone wants to be a specific family because of that family's specialty, if someone wants to revisit a town they lived in previously. We used to have runner babies that would take off and die asap so they can be reborn somewhere else. With gene score that harms mom, so we have SID to allow them a quick death without harming your score. Don't take it personally.
You don't have to do anything as leader if you don't want to. If you're not comfortable giving orders, give some moral support. Order, everybody's doing great! Order, you're killing it fam great job! If you see a hardworking youngster doing something that seems hard, you could always follow them. Actively following someone can lead to bad leaders though, so it's risky. Most people agree that letting the system choose by gene score is a good idea, because people with a high score obviously care about helping the family thrive.
Thank you for finally, FINALLY fixing curses.
Do nieces and nephews affect your gene score when you're female?
If not fleeing homeland as a woman is a clear exploit.
A lot of forum users probably rank high on the leaderboards, and as a result you all may have had some experience with leadership in the past week.
Let's talk about it!
A prompt to get us started: what do you like/dislike in a leader? I like leaders that take time to stop and teach new players.
you do tho
curse destinycall
The fact that engines can be removed from a well and scrapped is malicious development. It's a slap in the face to players. There's no reason behind it, just a huge fuck you. The modern fossil fuel tech is already unsustainable, you don't have to be such a dick about it jason.
It probably also has to do with the fact that a lot of people CAN'T play. The curse system is badly broken and locks a lot of players in donkey town indefinitely, forever, for no reason. The only time I can play is early in the morning or very late at night. I've tried to log in every day for the past week and it's just- *POP* donkeytown. I haven't been cursed since february. It's ridiculous that jason apparently doesn't care to fix this BADLY BROKEN, literally game-breaking system.
Controversial opinion: plant a ring of 8 berry bushes surrounding a cistern in the sheep pen. Dig up all other berries in town.
Cement the idea that berries are sheep food by placing them within the pen.
What would you all consider the optimal placement for cisterns then?
Personally I think they should be as close to the well as reasonably possible.
Homesick just makes you infertile. It's so that different families can't live together in the same town, just visit. That way you have to travel and trade rather than just cohabitating. Before homelands everyone just lived in one or two big multicultural cities where all the resources were gathered and shared freely. It was an extremely successful type of society and all of our longest-lived families came from that era. Now we have to live apart and the well is laughably easy to wreck so families are very short lived.
Cisterns are one of the most useful types of town infrastructure and they're criminally underused. Every 'finished' kitchen should feature a cistern. Every farm should feature a half dozen or more. Too often all we see are a pathetic couple of cisterns and that's just not enough. Water is life in ohol, and having the ability to stockpile water is what allows towns to survive drought. In almost every life that I spend producing water I find that I'm able to produce much more than I can store. The bottleneck never comes from lack of resources, but lack of storage. Especially now with diesel wells being so easy to grief, the way to survive long term is to exhaust a tarry spot, spend all your fuel at once and store the water in cisterns. The system is just way too vulnerable, when you find a moment of opportunity it's important that players can exploit it to the fullest. Otherwise the engine or the fuel or both will find legs and walk off, leaving the town high and dry.
To provide stability in towns during times when there's nobody to carry them, we need cisterns. As many as possible. Four by four blocks of cisterns surrounding the town well in place of ripped up berry bushes. Take a horse cart full of baskets, gather stones and limestone then build all the cisterns. The well in a mid-high tech town only runs rarely, so it's important that when it does a whole ocean of water can flow out. Build so many cisterns we can use up all the iron, all the kerosene at once and store the water for later.
I enjoy lives where I can form a bond with another player. Bob the baker in a crowded city, an old man who worked his whole life feeding the busy people. He's complaining about how everyone just rushes through his kitchen gobbling up pie and nobody ever notices or stops to thank him. So I say, thank you bob. I loved those carrot rabbit pies, they were really yummy! That's my specialty, he tells me. I noticed that little personal touch he put into his work and showed him it was appreciated, and to him that makes this hour of his life worth it.
Get three coffins ready.
Primary jobs:
These jobs support primary needs and mutually support each other.
- Farmer. Produces berries, carrots and wheat.
- Shepherd. Feeds lambs, shears sheep then butchers them. Produces compost.
- Baker. Produces bread and pie. Feeds fricken everyone.
- Smith. Produces and replaces tools.
Secondary jobs:
These jobs support secondary needs and help grow the town.
- Lumberjack. Chops and hauls wood, known for clearcutting swamps.
- Miner. Mines and hauls iron ore. Greatly enjoys phat stacks.
- Nanny. Stands next to a fire and chants "bb time bb time bb time." Feeds all the town's bbs.
- Carpenter. Self-employed. Installs hardwood flooring. Builds boxes, shelves and carts.
- Hunter. Gathers furs and wild game to help feed and clothe the town. Exterminates dangerous critters.
- Chef. A more advanced baker. Focuses on non-baked staple foods and yummy treats.
- Trader. Travels to distant settlements to gather specialty goods.
- Bricklayer. Gathers and lays stone roads. Often, these roads go nowhere.
I issued an order to plant more wheat and bake bread. Someone standing by a 3-wide patch of wheat insisted, "we already have wheat."
Meanwhile there are a dozen bowls of cream just waiting to be made butter. The town could live for two hours on buttered bread and they're all starving because nobody's baking or buttering.
Meanwhile, the town leader is making murder mouth at anyone that touches a carrot, because we have only one row and no seeds. People munch them anyway.
It seems like a lot of players have trouble even understanding what's food and how to eat it.
Today I was in a town undergoing renovations. We were digging up all the berry bushes and replanting a small section next to the sheep pen, outside the town center. So people don't munch. There was a LOT of concern and confusion about why the precious berries were being dug. Towards the end of the project most of the town was lamenting our doom. There's no food! Nothing to eat! We're doomed!
Meanwhile tons of broth, corn, milk, turkey etc surrounding them. Whole and skim milk with pouches, bowls and bottles. Someone told me angrily, "I can't EAT milk!!"
To people asking jason for reverts back to previous iterations, before new contrived and unwelcome systems:
It will never happen.
Jason is a thoroughly independent developer and he answers to noone. Not even the player. There are a lot of poorly implemented mechanics shoehorned into a game that doesn't welcome them. That's fine, from his perspective. To make them work he'd have to have made the game fundamentally different. It's an experiment for future development. It clearly doesn't work in this game. That's fine, it's not the point. The point is to experiment and try out ideas for future titles.
This is his most successful game by far. It's already produces much more than expected. Might as well milk the golden goose, right?
So basically, this system is based on elder-approval. The oldest person in town is the leader. In order to kill anyone, the elder must exile them. Then, anyone can solo kill that exile without any chance of retaliation.
What's to stop a griefer from just... hanging out until they're old? Hide the bellows, drop a stack of buckets behind a tree. Munch a lot of berry and hoard all the pie. People get suspicious there's a griefer. So you kill all the sheep or release some boars in town. Now you're old and you start making accusations. Lying about him or her being a griefer. Your friend gets stabby and backs up your lies. Nobody knows what to think and you keep throwing your weight around. Anyone who doubts you gets stuck. People stop doubting. Meanwhile you keep picking them off one by one.
I bet if you tried you could stagger your births so as soon as one of you dies from old age the next becomes the elder, and so on. Order your targets by age, the oldest die first because they're your rivals. It would be easy.
I'm not saying that we should be able to establish some kind of shady ohol hegemony from coordinated veterans. Make it anonymous if you want, we don't necessarily need individually assigned bless-names. Just make it a generic +BLESSED+ or something. I mean, there's a clear precedence here. Cursed players are already marked between lives. The theme of strict anonymity is already violated, why are you so reluctant to give us a blessing mechanic?
I don't believe that the posse system can achieve results, no matter how much you tweak it.
To begin with we needed this no-solo system because of griefers using medical vests to repeatedly heal each other, meaning that even if you wounded them several times they wouldn't actually die until all their pads were exhausted. For each wound inflicted a townie would die during their cooldown. Posses were intended to counter this. They have largely failed. Statistically there are far fewer murders, sure. Most players agree that this is frustrating and they hate it. Now, only griefers can murder. Let's say posse requirements continue to become stricter over time. Then, nobody can murder.
Griefers can still grief very effectively without killing anyone. This is frustrating. We hate this.
So what do we do? Griefer murder posses are so effective because they establish trust. They are a group, not a collection of unrelated individuals. That's their entire advantage here. They can only be countered by another group. This proposal seems intended to organize that: using the hierarchy system in place of trust. It's not going to work because it's this goofy over-complicated halfassed idea like the rest of the posse mechanics have been.
We need blessings to establish friendly player in-groups. That's the only way that this works.
It's impossible to reliably establish trust in-game, there's too much going on. Everyone's too busy with their own lives to take note of every towns-person's moral character. Communication is difficult and in a pinch there's no way to know who's good or bad. All they know is there's someone trying to murder, someone got stabbed. Why? Was the guy you killed evil? Are you evil? What's going on here? Nobody knows what's happening until it's too late: there's no trust, no communication and no kind of organized reaction.
Blessings, like curses, are clear and straightforward. Even a new player can understand them.
A new player with a genius daughter who goes straight to work for the town can see she's a good kid and bless her. A simple carrot farmer who needs a hoe can go to the smithy and see a clever young man with a cowlick banging one out straight away and bless him. A brand new player who's learning the basics of the game from his patient mother can express his thanks, by blessing her. I like you, you're a good person, thank you. Bless you. Even without any esoteric effects on birth conditions, the simple fact of being able to mark trusted players across lifetimes would make all the difference. It would shut down this kind of confusion overnight and make posses SO much easier to implement in a simpler and more effective way.
It could also provide a much-requested mechanic to reverse curses towards innocent players...
People who can do it will do it, people who can't do it, won't do it
Even if you can do it, do you want to do it? I've drilled oil a few times because I was curious what the process was like and I wanted to try something new. Turns out, drilling for oil gets old fast.
Maps and waystones for tarry spots are always outdated, so you have to spend half an hour running around in the wilderness far from home to find a viable location. Then run back and forth through more bland wilderness transporting materials to drill. It's easy enough to do, just really boring. If you care enough to bother you can pump a lot of oil in a few lifetimes, it's really not that hard. But do you really care that much to spend your precious recreation on a tedious virtual-resource grind? When it's very likely that the towns you're supporting will die out overnight anyway?
Last time I drilled oil was when the homeland update came out, because traveling to foreign towns and working with other families was still fresh and new. It was fun that time. It's not fun any more. I'm not gonna bother, and if nobody else does either that's fine. The town was going to die soon anyway.
That's the sort of nihilistic, fatalist mentality that I think a lot of players are being forced into with all these artificial difficulty updates. It's cool to see a town that lasts a long time. It's cool to see it grow and expand over time as a week or two of history gradually builds up. It's cool to log in day after day to see that family you worked hard for is still going strong. It motivates players to contribute to that continued survival and keep the story alive. When there's a hard cap around 50 generations and you know your family will never survive the night, it's hard to stay motivated. They're dead no matter what we do. So why bother?