a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I forgot to update the title.
The initial idea was that, in the absence of material goods to share, the leaders could give status to their followers. Hence "inverted hierarchy".
I had great success with asking people to do basic but time-consuming things for me. Call me lazy, but I don't like to spend minutes searching for clay to save seconds on teaching people.
But I noticed that at no point did it seem appropriate to ask them to follow me.
Asking someone to follow you immediately feels like you're saying you're better than them. Like it's a play for social status, with no justification other than vanity. And humans really don't like to give people status for nothing.
And it is, but the perceived status is much higher than actual status. It doesn't even work as a proof of your ability to convince people to do stuff: self-starting players don't need to be told what to do, but there are other players who will follow anyone for any reason.
Being a Lord is a tiny better than not being one, but any title above a Baron has negative utility: it signals that your followers are doing it for vanity points and not for coordination.
I suppose there is one good reason to want to have followers: the follower badges are easy to recognize.
TL;DR:
Asking someone to follow you is asking them to give you status. People don't like that. The improvement in communication efficiency is not worth the relationship damage.
There are two ways to fix this.
1. Remove the extra perceived status. For example, replace the titles with neutral "Alice, follower of Bob, leader of 4".
2. Give the leaders something to reward their followers with. Mentioned in previous threads, an ability to approve their followers as their representatives might help.
You can be born to the person you cursed since its only one way.
IIRC it's two-way now
Why?
Yeah, how would this improve the game?
Every time I hear disability suggestions I question why you'd play that life. Just kill yourself and get a normal life where the game isn't screwy.
There could be a large list of disabilities. Everyone would be born with one. Like Rimworld.
You'd still /die until you find an acceptable combination of disabilities and other things, like skin color and tech level. You already kinda do.
The more independent random properties there are, the less you gain by rerolling.
Killing each other in the towns seems to be a part of the game by now. Kill as many as you can while maintaining plausible deniability, so that it's not easy to justify killing you for other players.
I want some reason to have distant outposts... Like the further you are from 0, 0 the more inhospitable it becomes but there are certain biomes/items that only spawn way tf out there
This.
We don't need the map to be infinite in every direction. There's no reason to have multiple civs on the same server if they do not interact.
We can safely use north and south for new biomes.
while its creative, it also wastes a lot of space
Like Disneyland :D
Move all the walls into the corner, lure the bear into the corner, place the last wall?
The westwards movement is a bit like The Doomed City, except the city was moving on its own. We're moving west because we're chasing the Eve spawns, but in the book they were moving west because they had to move and there were no other directions: up the mountain, down the mountain, west through the swamps, or back east through the ruins.
I don't think there's trade, but there's so much loot in the dead towns that a couple trips with a cart is worth as much as a lifetime of full-cycle smithing.
You could even say we have a dungeon-based economy, lol.
I think it's extra important to consider things that are space-intensive during city design!
That's the point, right? To find the optimal placement for everything that takes space in the city
Yum makes for an incentive to have camps. Also, making camps leads to more heat.
Both are only useful for food and having babies. You have infinite berries, so food is out.
Babies are a tragedy of the commons scenario: doesn't matter as long as there are no towns. Still, you can make small camps and combine fires and wild food for perfect temp and yum of ~5.
average estimated age
Child mortality being the main reason. Wikipedia cited this paper and claims that median lifespan was >46 for those who survived to 15.
> the population never rose too high
Population is limited by food supply, not lifespan.
...
Looks like there are three main options:
1. Find lots of ponds. Cook omelettes, turkeys and stew.
Free food, but limited supply, can be permanently griefed, and omelettes take a ton of space.
2. Cows and milk.
Very efficient, but can be griefed.
3. Potatoes and wheat.
Less efficient, but farms are hard to grief as long as you have seeds.
I guess mutton pies are also always available simply because every town needs wool?
It's probably best to start with the most crucial workshops.
What are the most efficient foods right now?
The plane and car and track cart are nice attempts in theory but in practice they're useless and trivial to grief. Some manner of low tech, instant transport should be available for limited distances. One second irl is about one week game time so there's nothing thematically flawed about delivering goods 1km away over the course of "a week" by low tech means.
Doesn't really need to be low tech. Just cheap, once you have the tech.
I think the biggest problem with city design is that there's never enough space. So:
1. Large, specialized workshops and warehouses with enough space
2. Roads between workshops for fast travel
3. Simple, intuitive layout for easy navigation
It's also important for the city to be resistant to entropy and griefing and easy to repair.
The game does not provide any incentive to craft anything at all. The only reason people make camps is because it's more interesting than running around naked and munching wild berries forever.
Squatting is the oldest get-rich-quick scheme there is. Business plan: build a property fence perpendicular to the road. Tax travellers. Sell and buy stuff for water. Hire henchmen to kill competition.
Tool slots seem like a halfway solution. Usually you have enough tool slots for doing everything solo. So it's a feature that is sometimes frustrating, but not crippling enough that you have to actually change the way you play the game.
Imagine if everyone had one tool slot. And they could only use it to learn a tool before 30.
Tool slots are also tied to the gene score. If you're experienced enough that you actually use up your basic tool slots, then you have to care about tool slots.
But I suspect that few people are actually at this level. Personally I just live to 60 and have enough tool slots to do everything I want. In the rare cases that I don't, I just ask the closest person to do something for me. They usually agree because they also have enough slots.
Griefers could just destroy the food supply at a camp and the people in the camp would be finished, since they didn't have wild food as backup. Also, griefers could more easily destroy an Eve by destroying/hiding all of the wild food.
Uh, too bad?
Obviously the answer is providing better options against griefing specifically. Not providing consolation prizes for those who got griefed and couldn't defend themselves.
I think it's more complicated than that, because of the issue of griefing. Were this a single-player game I might agree with you, but again griefing exists, so I don't think what you propose would be all that feasible, it would just make it more likely that griefers succeed in their attempts at destruction and mayhem.
What do you mean? What's the relation to griefing?
It should be very dangerous to travel in the wilderness. Otherwise no matter how it's balanced, if Eve camps are at all possible, then you can walk around the map eating natural food and not growing anything yourself.
I really like that there's a long-ass road, and most settlements sooner or later come in contact with it. And you can loot dead towns.
If your suggestion is to add multiple levels to existing facets of tech in the game with each one better than the last, especially if it was used as a way of prolonging advancement in tech instead of imposing more restrictions and limitations on what a player can do, than that would be good.
Yep, this!
In some cases we already have multiple types of the same item, like walls. They just need to be rebalanced so that low tech options become obsolete.
Jason also mentioned that we're not replaying history, so it doesn't make sense to start with crude variants when we already know how the perfect version will look like.
But this doesn't mean that nothing will become obsolete in the process. If you're starting from scratch in the wilderness, you'll probably use a clay glass first even if glass or plastic is cheaper in an advanced society. Because the costs change depending on the tech level even if the knowledge level is the same.
One more reason for trees to be very flat: having a small number of powerful dukes makes it easy to turn the king into a peasant.
A single duke can just unfollow the king and become the king himself.
Two dukes can still easily cooperate and decide that one of them should rule.
Having less direct followers makes the tree more robust, but isn't actually beneficial to the leader.
Basically the system currently relies on each leader being conscientious about preserving the tree.