a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Hopefully, everything we found last weekend has been fixed.
Here's another chance to get as many people as possible online at the same time to test the game.
Day: Saturday January 20
Time: 10am PST - Noon PST (2 hours).
Even if you can't make it for the entire session, please pop in for a bit if you can.
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My memory isn't enough for a life-by-life recount, so I'll instead try to make some observations:
Birthing is much more sane than it was previously, and birthing is much less likely to kill the mother. Out of about 10 births I only had to abandon about 2, another 2 or 3 wandered off aimlessly, I think I had about 5 successful births where they got to the point of being able to feed themselves.
One birth caused me to nearly immediately die as I wasn't near food and it brought me down to 4 bars while I was carrying something. Suddenly losing a large portion of your food supply is pretty lethal in the early game, but this is a little unusual since everyone is in the early game so 100% of births were to someone in the early game... Normally that would be a precarious but somewhat rare scenario I think, especially if current food stores affect birth. Maybe temperature should affect birth too? As in for two mothers who are full, the baby goes to the one closer to neutral temp.
As many noted, milkweed was a very difficult resource. Personally I didn't really realize how much milkweed is necessary to get to a rabbit skin water pouch and kept planning poorly with how I was using my milkweed. I'll try to list out the things necessary for reference:
- stone hatchet (4 milkweed)
- snare (4 milkweed)
- fire bow drill (4 milkweed)
- needle and thread (2 milkweed)
I think that's it... so 14 milkweed if you don't waste anything. If you go the bowl route you can skip the snare and thread, so 8 milkweed. This is all while shivering without any clothing too, a full set of clothing is 6 pieces so 12 milkweed plus another rope or two for snares for efficiency, so let's say ~17 milkweed per clothing set.
So currently the best thing to do is probably to rush to clay bowls, then rush to milkweed farming and carrot farming and making clothing as you're able depending on where your resources are, but probably not prior to putting down crops. So yeah, I guess since you need so much milkweed before you can make any yourself I agree its spawn frequency ought to be bumped up a bit. That way rushing to milkweed is optional, not the only thing that makes sense.
There were a couple weird issues presumably due to latency, like I picked up a baby and it died in my arms and I got killed by a wolf but no wolves got less than 3 tiles away from me. I'm guessing both of those things happen entirely on the server and being an open source game, not really a way to avoid that I guess.
Back to babies, I don't think I ever had a successful mother-baby interaction about feeding. As a baby no matter what I did they would ignore my A/Z and just keep picking me up (I thought Z was universal for "I'm full, stop" by now) though I could mostly get their attention to feed me with "A". IIRC you said breastfeeding only 1 bar was inefficient right? Whenever I tried telling babies to tell me "A" when they're low they just kept spamming "A" over and over so I just ignored them and tried to time it from memory xD
With multiple people running around and such I've been noticing that it's extremely difficult to communicate. Maybe you could make text bubbles snap to the edge of the screen when they're within a few tiles off screen? It's really annoying when I can see someone's full body but they're at the top of my screen so if they're saying anything I have no idea. Here's a screenshot of how Ultima Online did it - https://uo.com/wp-content/grand-media/image/Hokuto.jpg you can tell that speech that's too close to the edge or slightly off-screen is being brought fully onscreen and aligned with the edge of the screen. Speech from multiple people off the same corner will just overlap. Personally I'd prefer the speech to stack from each person too like it does in the screenshot, like if they say "M" "O" "M" then it'd stay onto 3 rows and each row would fade after X seconds (something very short like 1-2s). I'm sure there's some aspect of communication needing coordination or something like that but a lot of the time you can't even get the person to be able to tell you're talking at all, I think it's too far in the extreme end of the balance currently.
And yeah, with no advantage to being a male if I wasn't testing I'd almost certainly just suicide once I noticed my gender until I got female. IMO you should give males some consolation prize to not being able to participate in spawning... maybe they can carry 4 items in a basket and 5 in a backpack, maybe they're less likely to die from a wolf, not sure but it just seems strange to have two character types and give one of them a huge feature and the other zero. You mentioned you wanted to compare about lifeboats and drafts and such but if you give one character type advantages and the other character type nothing then of course the one with advantages will be protected, it doesn't matter what the advantages are, it doesn't really say anything about how valuable birthing is presently IMO, it just makes the game disappointing for folks who get stuck with males as it's most optimal to suicide until you get a female.
It's getting there though, the gameplay was for the most part pretty reasonable. Once some more content gets in there and maybe some diverging tech paths and some more biomes it'll really start to get interesting.
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I hear you about the chatting. I'll think about it....
Though if that's "the way Ultima" did it... wow, that screen shot is pretty overloaded! I can't make heads or tails of it...
Are you aware that up-arrow works to cycle through previous messages that you typed? So if someone doesn't notice you talking, you can chase them and press up arrow instead of typing it again.
Okay, regarding the whole male thing.... life is very different as a male in this game. I don't know if I'd call it an advantage, but you can go out on long journey's and such without having to worry about being stricken with a baby along the way. You can also chose to be a hermit, whereas a female character cannot truly do that.
Also, the choice about which babies to keep and which to discard can be a little more complicated than "always keep females." It's true that they were first on the lifeboats, but in certain cultures, female children are sometimes seen as a burden. I think that's because of the potential reproductive load that they represent. The farm just can't handle a bunch of extra mouths to feed, and that's what a female child can mean in the long run, potentially.
So, which one you will favor may change depending on the situation. If you're barely getting your farm off the ground, you may prefer a male child for now, because that will delay the influx of additional population growth more.
And every baby that suicides wastes resources that bring the whole civilization down.
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Though if that's "the way Ultima" did it... wow, that screen shot is pretty overloaded! I can't make heads or tails of it...
Are you aware that up-arrow works to cycle through previous messages that you typed? So if someone doesn't notice you talking, you can chase them and press up arrow instead of typing it again.
Haha well this is an extreme example just to show you how the positioning works. IIRC there's a hotkey you can press which makes everyone's name appear as if they said it as a message, so it looks like they just spammed that 3 times and took a screenshot with dozens of people stuffed into the screen. Normally it's far more sane. The feature I'm most begging for though is the pulling-it-back-onto-the-screen from a reasonable distance. If you don't think they should stack that's cool, but even with spamming it with up-arrow you still have to get onto their tiny little screen and you have no idea whether they saw it or not. If it pulls it onto the screen from a reasonable margin then it would be way easier to get someone's attention and relay quick messages without having to chase them down quite as much. I'm thinking like... 2-3 tiles off-screen? Maybe just 2. Basically, if you can hear them running then it follows you should be able to see them talking.
Okay, regarding the whole male thing.... life is very different as a male in this game. I don't know if I'd call it an advantage, but you can go out on long journey's and such without having to worry about being stricken with a baby along the way. You can also chose to be a hermit, whereas a female character cannot truly do that.
Also, the choice about which babies to keep and which to discard can be a little more complicated than "always keep females." It's true that they were first on the lifeboats, but in certain cultures, female children are sometimes seen as a burden. I think that's because of the potential reproductive load that they represent. The farm just can't handle a bunch of extra mouths to feed, and that's what a female child can mean in the long run, potentially.
So, which one you will favor may change depending on the situation. If you're barely getting your farm off the ground, you may prefer a male child for now, because that will delay the influx of additional population growth more.
And every baby that suicides wastes resources that bring the whole civilization down.
Yeah but having extra females vs running out of females is the difference between the colony continuing and it irreversibly ending. Having to eat another carrot or two every now and then due to a kid that you quickly kill off is a small inconvenience, especially since more often than not you probably would want that child unless you were very early game. Every male is basically taking food out of a female's mouth, and is no more capable of protecting them than a female.
And actually I was suggesting that seasoned players would probably kill themselves, not get killed by their parents (but maybe that too, but as you said there's a food cost to the colony that isn't suffered by the respawning child) because being a male will always be less contribution to the continuation of the colony than being a female and you get a fresh start every time so there's no real disadvantage to killing yourself anyways. I'm assuming that continuing a colony is the main factor driving gameplay, or that it would be for the more serious players at least who are going to be putting in the most lives.
You mentioned the bad mother penalty a bit ago, but that's basically just turning the female into a male and only after checking many times whether or not they want children and only at the expense of some food. And that food expense needs to stay low/reasonable since otherwise normal birthing is too dramatic/hazardous.
Maybe you could think of some more serious costs to letting a child die? Like maybe it would give a "morale" type of debuff to the mother and would make her move more slowly and be less responsive for some time, something like that? Maybe she's less willing to eat and her max hunger bars drop, perhaps permanently or for a while at least. If child death actually mattered then I could see your argument being stronger for the absence of births being a sometimes-advantage. As is it seems like once you get to farming or are near plenty of berry bushes it's not something that would slow you down much.
Anyways I'm making loads of assumptions here, it's probably better to just keep things simple and wait and see what happens when there's a more substantial population squirming around. I'm really looking forward to seeing that, even with our relatively small test groups it's interesting how quickly things can appear unbalanced when they seemed fine before. Hard to imagine how crazy things will get with swarms of people and the kinds of things that none of us will have considered.
Last edited by jcwilk (2018-01-21 10:55:39)
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Well, there IS a cost for a baby that suicides, if the baby is itself engaged in long-term thinking. The baby took 10 food from the colony, and when they respawn, they take another 10. Now, if they respawn in colony B, they've now given B an advantage against A (A took a 10-food hit for nothing). But if they respawn in the same colony... they've made themselves cost twice as much to the colony that they will eventually inherit.
And if babies are so precious, as you posit they are, and females are thus so valued, then males are valued for exactly the same reason. Females need to do everything in their power to make sure every baby survives. A long journey while pulling a cart while you have a baby out there means either that you leave the cart behind or leave the baby behind. Either choice isn't great. Whereas a male doesn't have to worry about that.
I experienced this myself, as a male, in the most recent playtest. We REALLY needed milkweed, so I took a basket of carrots and set out. My journey was more than one basket of carrots away (I found some along the way), and I needed to revisit passed carrot spots on the way back, since my basket was full of rope. But after about 15 minutes, I made it home with rope, and we could finally make a snare. And I was never stricken with a baby along the way. In fact, at the wrong moment along the journey, a birth might have killed me. And I would certainly have struggled to get that baby home safely. (And of course, I would have left my basket behind, making my whole life pretty much a waste).
I guess we could run the two-tribes thought experiment.
Clearly, a tribe that lets all female babies die is doomed in the long run.
What about two tribes, one of which lets all male babies die, and the other that keeps all male babies, so their population is 50/50? What about a third tribe that lets half of male babies die, so their population is 66/33?
The all-female tribe will likely "waste" some of their future babies on long journeys, and also waste 10 food per male baby. Not to mention adding to their "bad mother" limit for each baby that dies, though over the long haul, they might get a larger share of incoming babies, because they have a larger share of females.
Also, what happens during a war?
A somewhat simple twist here would be to limit the lifetime fertility of each woman. Forget the bad mother limit... maybe you only GET 5 babies total throughout your life. Then each male you let die wastes more than just food, and also you're rolling the dice again on the next baby.
But I'd like to let the experiment run for a bit as-is to see what emerges.
Another stupid-simple twist that has been suggested is to make males a small bit faster. BUT, I'm generally avoiding that kind of stuff. The true physical differences between average men and women who receive the same physical training are pretty small.
Men are still way more prevalent (like 98 to 2) in dangerous jobs that require no physical strength.
Also, I think this discussion hangs on the fact that men serve no necessary reproductive function in this game, where they do serve a necessary one in real life.
But their necessary function in real life is marginal, and only as important as it is due to monogamy (where each man, no matter how unfit, gets a chance to breed---how'd we trick women into that one?) "We need both a man and woman to have a baby."
I guess it could be argued that in a non-monogamy situation, the non-breeding males have value in that they fill the pool that helps to float the best male to the top. If you only kept one male baby around, how would you know you kept the best one? So you keep 'em all and let 'em fight it out later.
But for those non-breeding males, it's still marginal, and not a direct reproductive function.
Throughout human history, males also had value as cannon fodder. Will cannon fodder have no value in this game?
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I too think that having a baby in the game really is a handicap for the player who then has to waste a few minutes doing nothing but feed and eat and that this alone gives males an edge.
I am curious of what will emerge. I think an all-female strategy, even with the food cost, would give a demographic advantage.
If you want a way to have males have a role in reproduction, just make it more likely for females who often are close to males to have a baby.
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Yeah the decision on whether the tribe kills the baby or not are more interesting and nuanced, the one I'm more concerned about is whether the baby suicides to get the more influential role and to avoid the danger of being the last man standing (which may be no fault of theirs, maybe everyone else ages out or dies out of carelessness or unluckiness) which basically turns it into a single player game. As a female, as long as you yourself are playing optimally, you're never certain that you're stuck playing single player until you hit old age regardless of the actions of everyone around you.
I'm not suggesting that change of course, since males shouldn't have babies, but just worried that the advantage of not having unexpected babies is too small a compensation and that it would basically punish players for not suiciding until they get a female, which would lead to player behavior that's detrimental to the flow of the game overall.
It's not obvious or provable enough to be more than a concern at this point. This is probably something that will require the open alpha to confirm or deny, and there will likely be changes that affect it prior to then anyways.
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Yeah, I will certainly be on the lookout for degenerate behavior of all kinds once there are loads of people playing. I also have full birth/death logs going back throughout the entire history of the game, so I can make little graphs that show male vs female survival rate, life expectancy, infant mortality, population fraction, and so on.
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