a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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if you eve chain
How do you eve chain?
I live till 60 every life, die and just spawn as a new eve every time. Same eve cravings.
When playing on server1 the crave chain never reaches anything complex.
Mainly wild foods, mushrooms and basic vegetables.
There is also no food decay like with long generations.
While I enjoy solo play, this makes the game too easy.
There is also literally no motivation to cook complex foods cutting off much of the gameplay.
If there was some way that you could spawn as your own child at 3yo, on top of your own bones, this would be ideal.
Starting at 3yo would also increase difficulty and provide the extra 10m or so till death.
I've always been fairly impressed with OHOL but I, like many others, think there can still be improvements in core gameplay.
To that effect, I think Jason should occasionally enact major changes to core gameplay elements in order to see what happens.
If players really don't like it, they can always jump to server2.
Tiny little modifications could completely change the nature of game.
One thing is certain: The game cannot continue to grow if core elements remains the same.
Firstly, yes I am Forman you may have seen my name before and I have clocked at least 1000 probably 2000+ hours in OHOL.
Recently I started playing on Server1 which is mainly empty.
I went from eve to top tier tech in about 12 lives over a couple days.
When I came back later to see if I could locate my base (I did) I noticed several new bases and bodies around.
It had been about 2-3 irl days since I played last, and when I located my base, I could tell other players had been there.
Possibly 2-3 different people or 1 person for 3 lives.
Having done this, I realize this style of gameplay is at LEAST fairly new to OHOL (far as I know) and, in my opinion, superior.
There is a great mystery in this new, empty server. When someone does show up as your child, or a random roaming eve, it is exciting.
I think if the family algorithm was adjusted such that families did not exceed, say, 5 players the game, it would be better.
This is not to say that multiple families could not band together to form large cities.
Languages would ACTUALLY MATTER and exploration/navigation would be more important.
I've mentioned several times that NOMADIC playstyle is a good eve strategy and also fun.
I think mechanics should be adjusted such that bases are viewed as temporary, and that families may easily migrate across the map.
Spitting out many more families/eves would naturally unlock more iron/wells and partially started camps for families to move through.
I also think the biome band size should be expand 2-3x larger, possibly even 10x in order to put emphasis on family migration.
In this case if a family progresses to the rubber stage, they may have to migrate over generations, carrying the resources in order to unlock this tech.
And yes, I think this would actually be FUN. The current state of 10-20 people globbing in 50gen bases is ridiculously easy and basically pointless.
As a player who has sunk in 1000s of hours at this point, I will say there are MANY reasons to not want to play in a particular town.
To be honest, I don't much like playing in any town unless its gen1 maybe gen3-4.
The main reason is that they are so frequently designed poorly.
Forcing someone to play in a particular town is essentially forcing them to clean up your mess.
I don't want to live in your mess, I don't want clean up your mess.
I would rather eve then deal with other people's messes. Even if that means playing on a solo server.
I could very well see something goofy happening where someone is making a bunch of useless clay dice or worse someone just making and repeatedly smashing engines for points. Things will always be gamed by the players one way or another.
Already considered that which is why I mentioned the points only go up when the object is consumed/used by another.
Food is the simplest but this could apply to tools or engines.
Yes there are probably exploits but we could certainly plug them.
Most trolls are not willing to invest that much time in greifing and are honestly not likely very smart either.
The thing is it would take too much work to build it like that I'd rather Jason just fix the most pressing matters as simply as possible.
Removing SID subtraction makes sense, yes. I still think total hours played is a good enough solution.
Or multiply the current score system against total hours played or put a threshold with exponential growth/decay somewhere where the two variables overlap.
This is just a rough draft of a potential change that could be made to improve the chances of families outliving the "male curse" as I like to call it.
I'm just calling out the issues as I see them. I don' t really care /how/ things are fixed as long as the issue stops occurring.
The problem is simply that towns are dying because there are no fertile females, at inappropriate times.
The inappropriateness being that there is plenty of water and iron and the generation is still low (often less than 5 even).
I actually have no problem with more male births once situation has changed (no more water, running on diesel or there's no rubber).
Specifically, when generations get pretty deep, say 20, I think there should be MORE male births because towns last far too long imo.
I have no problem with families dying out but that should NEVER happen before the town at least hits the rubber well.
The utilitarian score idea is cool, but it gets hard to track with some things. What if your accomplishment is building homes? How do you track the usage of structures?
I actually think of building more as a privilege. Everyone always wants to do it and few know how to do it properly.
I'd be more inclined to make it cost in order to build than to reward. But it's still trackable either way.
Gathering would also be important to track somehow.
I mean, there's probably a good hypothetical answer, but the OHOL engine is only capable of so much. It'd be a tough thing to balance, too.
It's really not all that hard to do. The real difficulty is most likely in testing things and making sure nothing breaks.
Jason has resumed updates. There's a list of recent updates on steam and on the website.
My question with that is how can a leader simply exile and kill everybody so quickly? First of all, there should be a cooldown timer on exiling if there isn't imo. Second of all, wouldn't killing everybody take a long time and be pretty difficult? Like, if one person kills another, everybody usually will get super pissed at the murderer and try to kill them. Even if it's some serial killer on the edges of town, somebody would make it back to warn people.
Greifer behavior, the tricky kind, is all about lying and confusing people.
This is a game and people play to play and often don't pay attention to the nuances of greifer drama unfolding.
To that effect, a leader can exile someone, stab/shoot them and then say the person did something.
The victim will say they didn't do anything and there is little way to know who is telling the truth.
In the past, people DID figure out leaders were killing everyone.
But to kill the leader is quite complicated. You would have to get all of their followers to no longer follow them and/or accumulate a large group of followers in order to kill them back.
What actually happens, most often, is everyone just runs away.
Eventually the greifer leader dies of old age or starves.
The whole follower/exile/killing system is massively flawed but I honestly can't think of any simple fixes.
I'm sure it's somewhere on Jason's todo list.
One possibility I always thought about was tracking a utilitarian score.
That is, for example, when someone ELSE eats food that you've made, your score goes up.
When other people use your tools or horses or whatever, your score goes up a little each time.
This is one of the only TRUE way to measure 'greiferness' in my opinion.
I think that score should also be 'spendable' in order to do cool things, like choosing your spawn location, spawning as an eve, opening a iron vein, or even blasting someone with a lightning bolt to instantly kill them.
I think the game should base leadership on your current life. If you are the firstborn of the leader, you are the heir
Issue with that is it makes it more likely a griefer can become leader.
At which point, and it has happened, the leader can exile/kill everyone.
It can still happen now but it would be more probable in an heir system.
For an involved solution, I think the game should just track everything like a lot of games do.
How many pies have you made? How many diesel engines? How many radios?
For each thing you've done you get a score -- more complex things mean greater score.
Unfortunately everyone would start from zero and I don't even bother building a lot of that shit anymore.
After 20-30 or so engines, it just ain't the same anymore.
I think male birth rates are already lower than females anyway, so reducing it more is unnecessary. If a town dies as a result of too many males being born, that's pure unluck.
No, it's not just unluck. It's a poorly tuned variable.
Players splitting off to start new towns is annoying but insignificant.
Towns should die sometimes and that's perfectly fine.
But I've repeatedly -- as in dozens of times -- witnessed lively towns, with dedicated players and ample resources, suddenly die because there were no girls.
That is significant.
This is an example of a mechanic that is an obstacle to gameplay.
People will be playing the game normally and then suddenly just afk until death or suicide because the game/instantiation is no longer playable.
A similar issue was eve towns with no iron. Pretty sure this has been fixed now probably with just a couple tweaks to existing code.
Sure, it would be great if Jason could add more content but the game already has a lot of content.
Right now he appears to be fixing bugs and tuning variables which requires less time while having significant improvement on gameplay.
Surviving till old age does not predict skill level or game experience.
Rewarding high score players with more options (such as spawning back into family) makes sense.
The current score mechanic is basically arbitrary.
Total hours played, although flawed, is more indicative of player skill.
People want to play where they want to play.
Inhibiting this (outside of the curse system) is not at all helpful to the game.
It's just another obstacle.
can't delete this post
I don't know what the odds value is but it probably needs to be cut in half.
To be honest, either males should give birth or be removed it's only a obstacle at this point.
May as well SID until female.
For an eve button? Yes.
Not monthly though.
Some Advantages of this change:
1. Every player can always choose to play by themselves
2. Always an option to start something new
3. Eve doesn't have to feed kids they don't want to play with
--> When you consider this in the context of trust/curse, players could create white-listed families
4. Eve is leader and can exile players if they start acting badly
5. Less likely that Eves will be inexperienced players and
6. More Eves in the world means more options for players spawning normally
--> This effectively allows players to VOTE with their birth with respect to where/how they want to play
7. Players are no longer trapped in limited locations/families they may not want to play in
8. Player base will likely be more distributed throughout more families
--> This is good because right now there are often too many players in one family
--> This causes the family to burn through gameplay too quickly and creates conflicting goals
I was just considering the in game poll (solo play, private servers, both neither) for which I chose neither.
Simply:
1. Much of the OHOL emergent gameplay REQUIRES other human players
2. If you start splitting up the player base, this game will die
That said, I think there is a need for people to have more control on where and with whom they play.
Infinite map so there is a simple solution: Spawning as Eve should always be an option.
Eve option combined with /die and the curse system should be a simple but effective fix to a lot of problems.
except let the early families find their well.
The greater problem here is that the eve/starting process is complicated and easily screwed up, especially for new players.
The score system also does not reliably track player skill, so we have a lot of noob eves that don't know what to do (or just can't survive)
Many experienced players probably SID a lot and have some the lowest scores (myself included)
there is 1600 loose iron it is incredibly difficult to hide all of the iron.
Yeah, the gas vent blocking thing was a unique situation. It would be very difficult to grab all the iron.
If most of it had been stripped, it would just be one more thing you have to look for before setting up.
1 iron for a hammer, 1 iron for a shovel.
They can't run around the map and gather all the low-tier iron.
I mean, the code is already tracking 'first well state'.
If the family is in 'first well state', and the vein is already stripped, just trigger it to spit out more iron anyways?
1. It is an infinite map, after all, which means infinite iron. Infinite is a lot. (and by that I mean almost infinite, or infinite in practice). This undercuts any advanced mining things (why spend kero to get iron if you can just walk around and get iron?), and makes metal items not very precious.
I was just thinking about this specifically.
It would still be balanced if, say, muddy iron veins could be mined all over the map.
Only they cost exponentially... maybe 3-4 times as much food per mining pick hit.
Or if you could use the newcomen engine to mine the muddy vein but it costs a bucket of water each time.
The issue I see is that people often don't want to start new towns because it's hard.
When they are forced to do so, as eve, very few can do it correctly so it just becomes mayhem and then often fails.
If iron was always available all it would allow experienced players to start new towns in a more lasting, intentional way.
However... don't you need iron to make the shovel in the first place?
That is a good point.
It can still be implemented if the iron does not become 'loose' until the (first) well is opened with a shovel.
This will mean less loose iron to start but I don't think that really matters much.
A message when placing stones on a well site, or a command to locate the family well site is as good a fix.
What I found frustrating was that I usually go for a forge then bowls/plates and farm before even placing any stones.
Then, later find out that the iron is locked. Drat.
Today we then realized that we couldn't even find where the iron was if we did intend to go back.
So we were effectively dead.
So if a bad actor from your family wants to screw you over
It is griefable but, as I mentioned, gen1 families also just get lost/split up sometimes. Or noob eves place stones in bad areas.
I'm pretty sure I've actually seen noob eves complete stone rings where there was no iron.
Getting that first shovel made is actually quite difficult hence a more reliable location for the loose iron.
Foreman wants shovel to prevent the rogue baby from leaving Eve and making their own well site/iron veins.
Yes but just as important is preventing noob eves from opening the iron in a bad spot.
I think new players tend to have high scores and as a result frequently spawn as eve.
Where to open a well is probably the most important decision for a family.
At very least you should have to smith a shovel before making that permanent determination.
But I will look at it more closely.
My real issue is just not knowing.
If there was even a message when you place a round stone on a well site, indicating the iron won't open, that would be sufficient.
Or just prevent the stones from being placed if iron won't open.
But in the case of a lost eve, or lost well site, there is also no way to find it?
/leader only shows where the leader is, which may not be the well site.
Waystones also won't point to the home well.
A new command /home or /well could work.
I’m honestly in the camp that iron shouldn’t even be locked at this point
It would be interesting to see how that would play out. I'd probably eve every life.
Though it would be difficult with the food demand in older families.
The expected non roleplay non griefer goals if the kids aren't noobs is generally.
What I've been seeing mostly is the noob eves pick a spot and use up all the wild food/milkweed before they can produce food.
I've even died that way a couple times because the babies keep dropping and every bit of wild food is gone in every direction.
Now I deliberately run as far away from the well area as possible and get clothes/pack before coming back help build up.