Why there are no wars

Jk Howling · 2019-04-02 02:16:25

jasonrohrer wrote:

The lack of wars in this game is a symptom of a larger problem, I think. There's also no long-term trade, no long term culture, no policy-making, treaties, etc.
...
Quiz: Your family is running out of food, and your last girl child is about to starve to death, resulting in the end of your family line. Nearby in the same town, there's an unrelated family that has plenty of extra food. You ask for some assistance, but they refuse. You have a knife, and they don't. What do you do?
...
In that moment of desperation, people are barely motivated to resort to desperate measures. Where's the heated town meeting where we decide to load up the covered wagons and strike out for greener pastures? Where's the heated town meeting where we load up the bows and arrows and decide to raid the next village?
Where are the town walls and gates?

This is where, personally, I think your idea of the game is... deluding? clouding? the reality of it. It becomes particularly noticable in that 'quiz' you tried to pose to us, believing that it's even a scenario.. We are talking about the same game, yes? In what case would there ever be two families in the same town with separate, private food supplies lmfao. Even in separate towns, when would there ever be a scenario where you'd have to ask permission, when their food supply is there for anyone to take?

And you want to know why there aren't meetings, or policies, or treaties.. lol. Your idea of the game, and what the game is, are like entirely different creatures.

I can answer though. It's because they're irrelevant, entirely, to gameplay. They're a waste of time, a waste of effort, and chances are they'll be forgotten before your 60 minutes are even up. Simply put.. we don't have reason for it. Nor do we have ways to enforce it.

Why should I spend 10 minutes- a sixth of my lifetime- coming up with a policy with other players, when there's no way to enforce it? When chances are that the 'policy' won't even be remembered a few generations from now?

Most people focus on things directly gameplay related. Things such as creating tools, raising their babies to toddlers, making food. Things that have a direct impact on my lineage's success.

Policies, traditions, treaties, cultures- that has no affect on my gameplay, or my lineage's success. They might be entertaining little aspects of roleplay, but little more. I can entertain the ideas, I can crack jokes and such, but at the end of the day- I'm trying to survive, and ensure the following generations survive, and that roleplay has little place in that.

Your game will likely never have these aspects to it unless they become truly relevant to gameplay, and we have both ability and reason to enforce them. We can barely enforce the few ideals we have now, let alone your fantasized policies and treaties. Give us the means and the motive, and they might be carried out. Until then, you're not really gonna find any of these things in the game. Not as it currently is.

Open your eyes, Jason.. See your game as it is, not as you want it to be. You'll find the two extremely different in comparison.

Added note, I'm not hating on the game. I enjoy the game, and still play rather regularly. But it definitely isn't what's envisioned in this post, nor will it ever become such without some major mechanic changes.

futurebird · 2019-04-02 02:29:02

In any story there are antagonists. It could be man against man, man against himself, man against family, man against society etc. in OHOL it's man against nature or the environment first and foremost. You mostly want to see other survive since you know how hard it is. That's a good story and part of what draws me to the game.

There are a ton of games with wars and rivalries and fighting and sports. In this game you really need to help each other and it give it a unique feeling satisfying other desires than fighting and "winning" you win together or not at all generally. I think some people are not comfortable with that.

OminousBladeBlank · 2019-04-02 02:29:46

Well it's official, Jason is a griefer too. Yo Jason, join the griefer discord.

I'll tell you though, I have waged wars. And here's a warning, deep within this thread. There are about to be a lot more wars.

antking:]# · 2019-04-02 02:38:03

I believe that the reason people don't make as many interactions with neighbors as in real life... Is that its not need all towns can become self sustaining!

In the real world we live in the most peaceful time in human history! and that's because its more beneficial to trade then to fight due to sustainability!
the reason people fight is for a resource, why fight with another town you don't need ANYTHING? their is now POINT!
unless they are holding an IRON VAIN! and another reason that people don't fight or trade is because they are TOO FAR APART! when their is room we will spread! and if their is NOTHING STOPING our spread WE DON'T MAKE UNOENS
WE DON'T FIGHT we never have had a massive food shortage! SO WE NEVER SHARE FARM LAND OR TAKE FARM LAND!!!
iron is so easy to find between cities that we can build cars! WE DON'T NEED TO TRAID!!!

my list of reforms

1# first make the map smaller this will make more people meet each other... and will make people fight or agree on land

#2 remove the linage ban.. not only will this improve the sustainability of large towns it will also remove, more eves and we don't want naked women running in the forsest if she could have been apart of a town getting and approving a trade agreement for furs!

#3 make mining, farming, and medications harder to control! mining shouldn't be running around trying to find iron on the surface it should be about entering a deep cave with a few of your people as you quest for ores, mettles, and jewels even with the fear of darkness, cave-ins, and hunger it also has to be hard, labor intensive wise! food should have a negative consequents ether in farming, or over grazing! have sheep tear through grass lands forcing people to relocated their animals... have a harder compost cycle or food longer to grow or crops die! make people more willing to try and find new lands to grow corn! have diseases that spreads this will make people eager to leave over populated areas for safety against lepers or towns to banished the plagued!

#4 have different types of clothing.... now what I mean might not seam important but identity is very important! we need away to distinguish groups! make jewelry, face paint, or even graffiti away for a town to have an identity such as every one wears robes, here! or every one has a symbol of a setting sun in our religion! this will promote not only family traditions but also show political divides! creating conflict or unions with different groups!

#5 Finally what I think is the most important is a goal! the unreachable goal! that is real but is can't be reached! people love then their is a goal... that's why sports are so popular to get that fame! people will fight for an answer if some one tells a group that another group has a piece of the puzill they will fight !

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-02 03:25:57

happynova wrote:

I go over to where the food is and eat it. Why do I need to ask for anybody's help? Do they have this food locked up? If so they're clearly in the wrong, because the town's food is the town's food. It's not like the Smiths and the Joneses have separate farms and bakeries, because that would be dumb.

That sums up my point precisely. We have separate food supplies in real life because this stuff matters. This stuff doesn't matter in the game, so we don't. It currently would be dumb to have a wall around your garden and only let your family in to eat food, because your family doesn't matter. But if your family mattered, it wouldn't be dumb at all. In fact, it would be dumb to not have a wall.

I had big dreams for this game, in terms of the human systems that would emerge from it. None of these systems exist in real life according to any fundamental law of the universe. Property rights are a human invention---a very natural and necessary one, given the state of the universe, but still an invention. So I still have no interest in building such systems into the game explicitly---I don't think I have to, if the fundamentals are designed correctly.

But I'm still asking probing questions about WHY these things haven't emerged. To say, "We just don't have time for it," is an easy, dismissive explanation. "We don't lock our houses, and pass the keys on to our children when we die, because the keys get lost." What? Keys are just as easy to lose in real life. There has to be another reason. It's because houses don't matter, and property doesn't matter, and "children" don't matter. If such things really mattered, the key would be a huge priority, and it would not be lost.

People lock their houses in Rust... it's like the very first thing that you do in the game. Step 1: Make a lock.

Maybe it's because in Rust, you aren't starving from the get go, and you have time. But I bet that even if I removed food pressure completely from OHOL, people wouldn't suddenly start making locks as their top priority. Something else is afoot here.

So I need to get to the bottom of WHY the Smiths and the Joneses are just sharing everything without a care in the world. I need to figure out why it doesn't matter, currently. If they're just sharing everything, how can they ever engage in trade? Or employment? Why do we need laws? How could there ever be a real, multi-generational feud?

Imagine if the Montagues and the Capulets lived in the same house and shared the same garden and took care of each other's children. There's no room for macro drama there.

futurebird · 2019-04-02 03:35:04

I've had kids who were real jerks, they aren't my friends, nothing like a real child who tends to look up to and follow their parent. There isn't any deep reason to protect your kids over other because both could be just anybody and some of the time the valuable skilled helpful nice player isn't the one in your family. People favor their family and kid in real life because you have formed deep bond over years. In a game like this you have 4 min. That's nothing.

Kids, parents, family can be jerks in real life too, but often the parent knows them better, knows why they are like that again that year of bonding and building something shared.

So, it is about time.

Also not everyone is klanish even in real life. I don't think "feed my kid or some other" *is* and obvious question at all.

antking:]# · 2019-04-02 03:36:32

jasonrohrer wrote:

happynova wrote:
I go over to where the food is and eat it. Why do I need to ask for anybody's help? Do they have this food locked up? If so they're clearly in the wrong, because the town's food is the town's food. It's not like the Smiths and the Joneses have separate farms and bakeries, because that would be dumb.
That sums up my point precisely. We have separate food supplies in real life because this stuff matters. This stuff doesn't matter in the game, so we don't. It currently would be dumb to have a wall around your garden and only let your family in to eat food, because your family doesn't matter. But if your family mattered, it wouldn't be dumb at all. In fact, it would be dumb to not have a wall.
I had big dreams for this game, in terms of the human systems that would emerge from it. None of these systems exist in real life according to any fundamental law of the universe. Property rights are a human invention---a very natural and necessary one, given the state of the universe, but still an invention. So I still have no interest in building such systems into the game explicitly---I don't think I have to, if the fundamentals are designed correctly.
But I'm still asking probing questions about WHY these things haven't emerged. To say, "We just don't have time for it," is an easy, dismissive explanation. "We don't lock our houses, and pass the keys on to our children when we die, because the keys get lost." What? Keys are just as easy to lose in real life. There has to be another reason. It's because houses don't matter, and property doesn't matter, and "children" don't matter. If such things really mattered, the key would be a huge priority, and it would not be lost.
People lock their houses in Rust... it's like the very first thing that you do in the game. Step 1: Make a lock.
Maybe it's because in Rust, you aren't starving from the get go, and you have time. But I bet that even if I removed food pressure completely from OHOL, people wouldn't suddenly start making locks as their top priority. Something else is afoot here.

So I need to get to the bottom of WHY the Smiths and the Joneses are just sharing everything without a care in the world. I need to figure out why it doesn't matter, currently. If they're just sharing everything, how can they ever engage in trade? Or employment? Why do we need laws? How could there ever be a real, multi-generational feud?
Imagine if the Montagues and the Capulets lived in the same house and shared the same garden and took care of each other's children. There's no room for macro drama there.

people are sharing because of the community feel of a family!!! people don't need to fight if we share! and we only share if their is space, and enough recourses to share! the moment their isn't we get into wars as we fight over the very things that untie us! (also it helps that in rust you only care about your self and the entire purpose of the game is to kill!)

antking:]# · 2019-04-02 03:38:36

we also need more weapons and as I stated before a way to identify what group you belong! with weapons I mean way to enforce rules!

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-02 04:27:51

JK, I am specifically considering such major mechanical changes to make such things not only possible parts of gameplay but necessary parts of gameplay.

Obviously, the game is currently operating differently from how I envisioned it. I envisioned something way better. I'm trying to figure out how to make it better. That's my job as a designer.

The idea that the "quiz" is laughable is precisely the point.

Those things could potentially happen in real life. They happen all the time in movies about real life, in fact. I just saw one called "The Impossible," where a mother and her own child were greeted by nearby howls from an orphaned child, and they had to decide whether to expend precious and limited survival resources to save the orphaned child. Later on in the same movie, two fathers negotiate about how to use limited resources in service of trying to locate/save one or the other's families. The movie is based on a true story about a family that miraculously survived the 2004 tsunami in Thailand.

The fact that such things would never happen in my game is a big problem. The fact that, even if I took steps to encourage such situations (by moving villages closer, or any number of other quick fixes), such situations wouldn't even matter to players---that's an even bigger problem.

Role playing isn't my bag. Not at all. Real playing is my bag. I don't want people pretending to care about the fate of their children. I want them actually caring.

In real life, if your baby ran off into the desert, you'd chase it endlessly. You'd call to it. You'd plead with it. In this game, you just shrug your shoulders and move on.

As a result of all of this, I don't think the stories that occur in the game are as interesting or as meaningful as they should or could be. That's my fault, and it's my job to fix it.

happynova · 2019-04-02 04:42:27

jasonrohrer wrote:

So I need to get to the bottom of WHY the Smiths and the Joneses are just sharing everything without a care in the world. I need to figure out why it doesn't matter, currently.

Well, I mean, I think part of the answer is because human beings think it terms of "us" and "them," but we define "us" and "them" in many different ways, not just by who shares our last name. If I'm a Smith and I'm sharing a town with the Joneses, as far as I'm concerned, we're all "us." It's all of us against the fear of starvation, the sad possibility of the town failing and going empty and all that our ancestors worked for being lost. The only "them" is the bad seeds among us who would rather destroy than create. (And dealing with those people is often the exact opposite of a fun dramatic challenge, too, but that's a conversation I know we've all hashed over in the past.) I might slightly favor my own family, might choose my own offspring over someone else's if artificially forced into the situation, but in a real way, I consider all those around me who are working for the good of our common society to be my people.

And I think that perhaps is an emergent social phenomenon that comes out of the gameplay. Cooperation is just plain necessary. A town works better with everyone contributing towards the common good, rather than through some people hoarding stuff for themselves. Because none of us can do everything that's needed all by ourselves. The more people doing different things, the more that gets done, and the more everyone benefits. That's an emergent social phenomenon, too, and one whose development was very important in human history: specialization. If one group does the baking and another does the smithing and someone else does the farming, that's a lot more efficient, once you reach a certain number of people, than if every immediate family has their own bakery and their own forge and their own farm, duplicating lots of effort and using lots of extra resources. Plus, locking stuff up and defending it is not actually easier than just making more of it to share, and the conflict it'd create only damages everyone's chances, anyway.

I'm not sure why you think the fact that the social structures that have emerged are cooperative rather than competitive is a bug rather than a feature! You've demonstrated that human beings aren't all inherently selfish and awful but do want to cooperate with their neighbors. and that's kind of nice, right?

But I think that if more competition is something you think should exist, the best unit to think it terms of is not the family but the town. That's certainly how players seem to think, at least the ones who are really invested in it. You hear people talking about "the good of the town," "the future of the town," "protecting the town." Not, generally speaking ,"the good of my family," etc. At least not once the town grows past the point where the town population and your immediate family are essentially the same thing.

Basically, people are emotionally invested in the idea of "the town." That's the "us." And, honestly, I don't know why you'd expect anything else. People might scrap with their neighbors, but they usually only war with other tribes. If you want conflict and war and trade, it seems to me that the only possible way you're going to get it is with multiple towns, much closer together, with enough differences that they might have things the other wants. Which isn't the game you've set up. The game you've set up has very isolated towns that are all likely to have more or less the same access to resources. (And that's without getting back into the serious time and communications restraints that make genuine organization extremely difficult.) I mean, I'm cool with that. I like the game you made. But it's not that one.

futurebird · 2019-04-02 04:56:03

happynova wrote:

I'm not sure why you think the fact that the social structures that have emerged are cooperative rather than competitive is a bug rather than a feature! You've demonstrated that human beings aren't all inherently selfish and awful but do want to cooperate with their neighbors. and that's kind of nice, right?
But I think that if more competition is something you think should exist, the best unit to think it terms of is not the family but the town. That's certainly how players seem to think, at least the ones who are really invested in it. You hear people talking about "the good of the town," "the future of the town," "protecting the town." Not, generally speaking ,"the good of my family," etc. At least not once the town grows past the point where the town population and your immediate family are essentially the same thing.

I think part of this is because buildings are unique, the most creative permanent thing you can make in the game. They way you set things up is unique. If you think you did a neat job, you want that set-up to persist. Maybe the answer is more player creativity and choice. Another factor is I know in my next life I could be born in the town that I'm "at war" with so war is even more destructive than normal.

This is a bit like an SF story I wrote about a future "utopia" that had one day every year where you had to live someone else's life (they were VR people who had been uploaded so this was possible) The idea of the switching was to make everyone aware of what others deal with and thus more considerate. In the story it works (up to a point) Because the wealthy find ways to get around it. Since people who don't like rich people would do as much as possible to ruin their lives on the switching day, rich people would lock themselves in rooms located remote areas with no mirrors. That way the person taking over their body couldn't discover the wealthy person's identity and thus minimize damage...ok that was a tangent.

But, I have to say: forcing war into the game seems kind of sad and like a bit of a wag the dog situation to me. I'm not against wars happening, but it has to be organic or it will feel like every game I hate that forces you to fight puts a gun in your hand and the only option is shoot things. There are too many games like that, that funnel you in to violence. I like that violence is a choice and it's neat to me that it's one that most players don't make even if it's there. It's more meaningful than if the game forced you to be nice (which other game do as well)

Last edited by futurebird (2019-04-02 04:59:43)

Gabby · 2019-04-02 05:15:07

Seems like the kind of thing that can't really be helped when the whole premise of the game is that you live a different life every 60 minutes, if that much.

We see wars and fight for supplies and stuff in games like, say, EVE Online, because things are less "temporary". While you can still lose all your stuff, there isn't certainty that you will lose all your stuff every hour.

I do not see how anything can be changed without changing what is the main premise of this game, and that is not something that I would like to see happening.

About sharing everything, well, even the biggest towns, even if they have multiple families (which I've rarely seen), they do not have a lot of people. And we don't want to play alone. So we share things, so that there are other people to play with around us. It is pretty sad to be the last one in a dying town.

Wait... Oh shit this was posted on April Fools. It's already the 2nd here so I didn't notice.

Last edited by Gabby (2019-04-02 05:24:53)

Whatever · 2019-04-02 05:20:07

jasonrohrer wrote:

People lock their houses in Rust... it's like the very first thing that you do in the game. Step 1: Make a lock.

Because it is their house. Because they can get back to it. When they log in the next day it will still be their house.
In ohol you get banned as soon as you finished your house and cant get back to it anymore.
But i am not saying that it is bad the way it is right now.

Gabby wrote:

I do not see how anything can be changed without changing what is the main premise of this game, and that is not something that I would like to see happening.

I agree, except that i think i would like to see something like this: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … 883#p51883
if implemented correctly

Last edited by Whatever (2019-04-02 05:22:08)

happynova · 2019-04-02 05:29:41

futurebird wrote:

I think part of this is because buildings are unique, the most creative permanent thing you can make in the game. They way you set things up is unique. If you think you did a neat job, you want that set-up to persist. Maybe the answer is more player creativity and choice.

Yeah, I think "more uniqueness" is the obvious answer to this, really. (Although how you go about achieving that is another matter entirely.) The more uniqueness your town has, the more it's going to feel special and the more you'll value it, and the more interaction between different civilizations might actually mean something. Right now, the only uniqueness is in buildings, and artificial RP stuff, and a little bit in the biome layout. But that last thing doesn't actually make all that much difference once the town is well-established, because every biome you need is going to be reachable without too much difficulty, or you're going to fail early on.

IRL, some places have more oil and some have better farmland and some have access to waterways and some specialize in certain kinds of technology. You don't really get that in OHOL. It's kind of a binary. Either you're in a place where you can build a civilization, or you're not. And if you are, the people 2K tiles away aren't really going to have anything you don't or have done anything different in their town from what you've done in yours.

futurebird wrote:

This is a bit like an SF story I wrote about a future "utopia" that had one day every year where you had to live someone else's life (they were VR people who had been uploaded so this was possible) The idea of the switching was to make everyone aware of what others deal with and thus more considerate.

There's a sort of thought experiment in philosophy that says that maybe the ideal way to get people to enact utterly fair laws is if they could do so without knowing what part of society they actually belonged to (like, by some kind of memory wipe or something.) If you don't know whose life you're going to have to live, you have a very real incentive to make sure that life is fair for everyone!

Which is also a tangent, but there might be a bit of relevance there, who knows.

futurebird wrote:

But, I have to say: forcing war into the game seems kind of sad and like a bit of a wag the dog situation to me. I'm not against wars happening, but it has to be organic or it will feel like every game I hate that forces you to fight puts a gun in your hand and the only option is shoot things. There are too many games like that, that funnel you in to violence. I like that violence is a choice and it's neat to me that it's one that most players don't make even if it's there. It's more meaningful than if the game forced you to be nice (which other game do as well)

Amen! Plus, if one is interested in what kinds of patterns might emerge from the game world, trying to impose the ones you're expecting from the top down is boring and counterproductive. If you want unexpected things to happen at higher, social levels, I think what that actually requires is more complexity at lower levels.

Tarr · 2019-04-02 05:42:20

jasonrohrer wrote:

Maybe it's because in Rust, you aren't starving from the get go, and you have time. But I bet that even if I removed food pressure completely from OHOL, people wouldn't suddenly start making locks as their top priority. Something else is afoot here.

I'm not sure if you've been informed or not but you do have a whole server where there is almost zero food pressure what so ever. Server 1 in specific has been bugged since the temperature update to specifically be perfect temperature at all times which removes almost all food related pressure for the game. Normally this wouldn't matter in the least since empty server with no players can exist in a state where it's mucked up and no one care about it however I've noticed since yesterday there are times where people are either explicitly going to the server (doubtful) or being redirected to it through the reflector (I've seen as many as 40 players+ on this server.)

Even with zero food pressure people were building in what would be considered normal meta biomes and weren't doing anything much more exciting than you would on the normal bigserver. People still made little bits of clothes, still made little farms by the ponds, nothing changed except that people had to eat less. I'm not sure how many people actively realized the server was bugged when put on it but they certainly didn't make grand cities or start mega projects with their new found freedoms.

The reason you don't see mega cities appearing on the main server is not because we don't have the time in game to do so but because our projects are explicitly blocked through things like lineage ban/area ban. Before you changed Eve chaining people could force spawn themselves into towns and thus created such wonders as Four Cities, Casino Town, or even Goose Town. Without the ability to return on command or more often than every hour and a half played or twenty four hours the players who build cannot finish their projects. Sure you can argue something like this is a legacy left to your children but unless your children are the type of players who like to build roads or buildings you are more likely than not going to return to find what you started still waiting to be finished.

Sure, you could game the current area ban by asking people in the discord to walk out of town to rebirth you to continue your previous work but who really wants to go begging or jumping through these hoops just so you can build some more roads or continue working on some random useless building.

You say you don't want the game to just become minecraft where people only play to build endlessly but for people to become invested in a town or family they need more than an hour playing in it. I can remember many MANY towns that I've played in the past because I specifically spent multiple hours in each one doing different things vs almost never remembering one off lives unless they were absolutely horrible. Hell, I had an in-game history project written across nearly fifty five pages detailing eight or nine different cities specifically written for other people to learn about some of the historical cities culled. I don't know how you'll ever get the community to pull away from the idea that the city is more important than the family unless you do something like make all cities lost permanently upon death. Though, I think something like this would lead to people thinking its meaningless to build at all again.

Last edited by Tarr (2019-04-02 08:42:20)

Dodge · 2019-04-02 05:47:33

One of the main reasons there is no war between villages is because big villages die out before becoming cities with the current ban system, so they die out before finding each other and even have the opportunity to go at war.

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5678

Now if big villages became cities and lasted longer than a few days there could be an incentive for war.

As the villages last longer the ressources would become inevitably lower, scarcity could mean death of the civilisation if nothing is done, so the different cities would build walls to protect their ressources and go at war with others or do trade and peace treaties or even alliances against other civilisation.

Only problem with this is currently iron is non renewable but at the same time lasts too long (tools not breaking enough to be an issue), so basically if you sit on a stack of iron you can thrive for generations and there is no incentive to either go at war to get more or climb in tech to survive longer (since climbing in tech wont make your village survive longer and can even make it survive less time since it uses the iron that could be used for tools).

But what if oil would give iron or even become the new iron, civilisations would fight over oil and the control of it

Making a digging and extracting machine to upgrade the iron mine would require a lot of steel and require advanced tech but the reward of it would be to be able to extract iron and other minable ressources using oil which means long term survival of the village IF there is oil to run the engine.

Which brings us to oil, currently oil is infinite and requires a decent but relatively low quantity of steel to make the rig, but if it would be nerfed and would refill over time at a certain rate (like water ponds/wells worked before) and if the rig needed to be upgraded using large quantitites of steel and if you needed at least 4-5+ rigs to have enough oil to sustain a civilisation, then the pressure on iron/oil would be a lot more of a concern and war for ressources would be bound to happen.

In the long run all the iron mines close to villages would be depleted and villages would fight each other for iron to upgade their oil rigs and make engines and tech or fight for oil to feed their mining rig.

Or there could be peace, cooperation, tradings etc

But for this to happen villages should be decently closer because right now finding other villages is either extreme luck or using exploits.

futurebird · 2019-04-02 06:17:02

Ok but even if you change oil and let people chain again I don't see "war" happening. If my town's oil kept getting swiped by another town I'd probably just move to the other town and work there. I don't see towns not wanting people who produce food and build and making things interesting. Maybe people who build more than I do would care, but what I'd see happening is the town with more people producing more and making it nicer wins not by "war" but by immigration. They get all the people. I also don't care to bring food to an army or police just to guard some well.

Maybe if you also made it so you couldn't just move for some reason, like you can't use the food as efficiently outside of town. But that feels contrived.

Grim_Arbiter · 2019-04-02 06:21:13

Ive written and deleted my essay for this post like three times.. its too complicated to put into words.. so i guess i just keep it brief.

But jason we need a common goal other than just survival if you want to see something like that right now. You're seeing the anarchy mixed communism because the bored veterans looking for something to do are mixing in with lower skilled people that cant survive past 12 most lives.

The closest thing I think I personally saw almost match your expectations was the mega city two apocalypses ago. There was culture development between families (I remember everyone hated the pizza family lol) I had an experience of war over the apocalypse that I wrote a thread on. I wasn't even a participant in the battle but an onlooker. If that happened to me i can't imagine what other battles people might have went through..

Simple fix for the problem in my eyes in regards to this right now..

Make two factions. One that wants apocalypse and one that wants nothing other than keeping it from ever happening.

futurebird · 2019-04-02 06:22:07

One more comment I think that in real life often wars are a function of the ruling class. Kings and presidents wage wars, ordinary people are only as invested as they can be taught to be by propaganda. So, in culture you need to have class before you have war.

We have crowns, but they don't have any power. And who wants to play the game and not be in the ruling class if you start that dynamic? For it to work you'd need a ton of people to play as "followers" and that isn't really appealing gameplay.

I think the most we might see are Hatfield's McCoy's type feuds. But a feud isn't a war. It's just escalating small scale violence over mostly nothing.

happynova · 2019-04-02 06:28:52

happynova wrote:

Yeah, I think "more uniqueness" is the obvious answer to this, really. (Although how you go about achieving that is another matter entirely.) The more uniqueness your town has, the more it's going to feel special and the more you'll value it, and the more interaction between different civilizations might actually mean something. Right now, the only uniqueness is in buildings, and artificial RP stuff, and a little bit in the biome layout. But that last thing doesn't actually make all that much difference once the town is well-established, because every biome you need is going to be reachable without too much difficulty, or you're going to fail early on.

Pondering this a bit more, I thought I might offer an example of the kind of thing I'm thinking of when it comes to making towns different from one another in meaningful ways. This is a totally random, off-the-top-of-my head example, and I'm aware there are some problems with it, but it's illustrative of the general kind of thing I'm contemplating.

Let's say your town is on a lake. And lakes are rare; there isn't another one for a 700 tile radius. Let's say that at some point in your town's development, someone has to make a choice. You can preserve the lake as a source of fish, or you can build a factory on the lake and dump pollutants into it. And whichever choice you make, it can't be undone. If you make choice A, you get an excellent food source, but more than that, oil from the lake fish is essential for proceeding up a certain branch of the tech tree. If you build the factory, you get super cool technical gizmos that take you up another branch of the tech tree, but you can't do the stuff you need the fish for. And you don't need to do either thing to survive, but both technologies have the capability to make your town cooler and your life easier.

Let's say you pick the factory. Now, while you're out exploring far from home, you find another town, with another lake, who have reached the point in their development where they're deciding which branch of the tech tree to choose. Can you convince them to preserve their fish and set up a fish-oil-for-tech-gizmos trade route? What if they're gonna build that factory anyway? Do you consider killing them and setting up your own fish farm on their lake? Do you resign yourself to never tasting that sweet, sweet fish-oil tech? Or do you go exploring for another lake somewhere else hoping to set up your own fish-farming satellite town, and screw those guys? No matter what you do, there's gonna be a story there,and it's a story that comes out of the fact that towns differ and choices matter.

Psykout · 2019-04-02 06:30:17

futurebird wrote:

One more comment I think that in real life often wars are a function of the ruling class. Kings and presidents wage wars, ordinary people are only as invested as they can be taught to be by propaganda. So, in culture you need to have class before you have war.
We have crowns, but they don't have any power. And who wants to play the game and not be in the ruling class if you start that dynamic? For it to work you'd need a ton of people to play as "followers" and that isn't really appealing gameplay.
I think the most we might see are Hatfield's McCoy's type feuds. But a feud isn't a war. It's just escalating small scale violence over mostly nothing.

This fits for a roleplay sense, but not in a practical sense. Simply it boils down to, there is no reason to fight over resources. War is expensive, and in OHOL a comrade that dies isn't just a grave, but a potential enemy respawn. It will always be cheaper to attain the resource organically, rather than through opposition. Until towns can specialize in a tech path allowed by their home biome and get by, there is no reason to seek it from someone else. We currently need a little bit of every resource to get to the point of stagnation that would make a brute force method enticing.

Last edited by Psykout (2019-04-02 06:31:28)

CatX · 2019-04-02 06:33:28

jasonrohrer wrote:

But I'm still asking probing questions about WHY these things haven't emerged. To say, "We just don't have time for it," is an easy, dismissive explanation. "We don't lock our houses, and pass the keys on to our children when we die, because the keys get lost." What? Keys are just as easy to lose in real life. There has to be another reason. It's because houses don't matter, and property doesn't matter, and "children" don't matter. If such things really mattered, the key would be a huge priority, and it would not be lost.

First I would like to point out that there IS war in this game. Lots of it. It is between griefers and decent people. And apart from there being more decent people than griefers, it still feels like the griefers have the upper hand. They decide when there's a war, and how, and why, and when they're around what they do affects everyone. 'In the game of griefers you win or you die...' Also, it's a war within family lines - you never know when one of your own kids turns out to be a griefer, born with the intention to destroy your town and your lineage for no apparent reason. And if your kids are griefers, they'll wreak havoc your town, not the neighbor town. It does break down the family structure quite a bit, because in the end, you'll feel more familiarity with strangers who are decent people than your own kids if they're there to destroy everything.

As for passing on items to new generations:

Children get lost.

I've noticed that in large towns, I'm usually able to find my mother, because she looks the same as when I was a baby. But my kids, if I've had many - I have to place the cursor on them to see their names.

If I'm old and want to pass on a key, how do I find my kids before I die when they're out and about...?

These suggestions might help:

- Let us be able to put kids in backpacks. This means it's easier to carry the kids with us, instead of placing them by a central fire. All women can't be nannies at the same time, that would be a waste. So the central nursery encourages people to be less connected to their kids.
Kids in backpacks would also make it easier to move a family. Sometimes I've wanted to move, but decided not to because I knew I'd start getting kids soon. Also, kids in backpacks makes it easier to teach new players how to do things.

- One of the joys in life is to give clothes to your kids. Make it easier to make clothes, and make the clothes more distinguishable. If I could give my kid a sweater with a woven star pattern, when I see an adult with that sweater, I would instantly know the kid was mine.

- And as someone else suggested, let us zoom out a little, so that it's easier to find our family and see what they're doing.

Grim_Arbiter · 2019-04-02 06:41:09

futurebird wrote:

One more comment I think that in real life often wars are a function of the ruling class. Kings and presidents wage wars, ordinary people are only as invested as they can be taught to be by propaganda. So, in culture you need to have class before you have war.
We have crowns, but they don't have any power. And who wants to play the game and not be in the ruling class if you start that dynamic? For it to work you'd need a ton of people to play as "followers" and that isn't really appealing gameplay.
I think the most we might see are Hatfield's McCoy's type feuds. But a feud isn't a war. It's just escalating small scale violence over mostly nothing.

The sad fact is that most war is mostly small scale violence over nothing. Someone on discord linked me to a war over a bucket where two European territories in roman times had a war over a town bucket that was (and still is) on display.

Both sides dont even have to be in the same mentality or economic standings though.

There are soldiers that view fighting as a way of life and even after fighting still carry out the soldiers mentality and persona.

There are soldiers that are put into the situation and want nothing other than to leave it and stop it somehow.

Last edited by Grim_Arbiter (2019-04-02 09:00:05)

Dodge · 2019-04-02 06:47:08

futurebird wrote:

Ok but even if you change oil and let people chain again I don't see "war" happening. If my town's oil kept getting swiped by another town I'd probably just move to the other town and work there. I don't see towns not wanting people who produce food and build and making things interesting. Maybe people who build more than I do would care, but what I'd see happening is the town with more people producing more and making it nicer wins not by "war" but by immigration. They get all the people. I also don't care to bring food to an army or police just to guard some well.
Maybe if you also made it so you couldn't just move for some reason, like you can't use the food as efficiently outside of town. But that feels contrived.

Immigration is just one scenario and what you would chose to do, but not everyone would do this, plus you can remember from past experiences what usually happens when more than one family is in a city

Also getting to the point where a civilisation has enough oil rigs to be sustainable would be really hard and require a lot of ressources, so since ressources would be lacking to be able to get to that point wars would happen to get these ressources

And if everyone migrates to one city like you're saying, what do you think will happen?

More mouths to feed means using more ressources which would enventually lead to the downfall of the civilisation, so if there is too many people in one place there would be a civil war and lots of murders to prevent the civilisation from dying out.

Oil rigs could be walled in the city and entrances could have guard towers where you can get in and shoot thiefs and invaders that are on the other side of the wall, or even traps that can be mechanically activated

DestinyCall · 2019-04-02 07:38:00

jasonrohrer wrote:

I had big dreams for this game, in terms of the human systems that would emerge from it. None of these systems exist in real life according to any fundamental law of the universe. Property rights are a human invention---a very natural and necessary one, given the state of the universe, but still an invention. So I still have no interest in building such systems into the game explicitly---I don't think I have to, if the fundamentals are designed correctly.

I think it is worth considering that property rights as we know them today are relatively recent human invention. Historically, there are MANY examples of cultures who did not view land and property as something that could be owned by one person or even by one group of people. They were something that should be shared by all people within the village/tribe. Because the community was more important than any individual person or family. You didn't own the land, you were part of it. Many of these cultures were eventually wiped out or subjugated by more property-oriented, expansionist cultures, but that's another story. The world of OHOL has a lot more in common with a primitive village, isolated and alone against a hostile natural world, than it has in common with the modern world or even our world in the last thousand years of rapid technological advancement. Despite the existence of planes and cars, the average OHOL village is cut-off from other villages by long distances, dangerous wildlife, and a may-fly brief lifespan. Even if we WANTED to trade (or fight) with a neighboring village it is a logistical nightmare of epic proportions.

Early trade starts as barter. Trading the fruits of your labor for the fruits of someone else's labor, with the goal that you will both benefit from the trade. But in order for a system of bartering to develop, you need to have a reason for people to specialize AND a reason for them not to simply share what they produce freely. Within a single village, there is no point in making a bunch of useful supplies, then requiring another player to trade with you to receive the items you made. I've come across one person who could honestly be called a "trader" in my time in OHOL. He was selling pies in exchange for berries. One pie for one berry. He specifically requested that the berries be fed to him directly. After payment, he would hand over the pie. It was an interesting career choice, but he struggled to do a good business for lack of willing customers. It brings up an interesting question. What is the value of one pie in OHOL? Surely it is worth more than a gooseberry. And starvation is a serious problem in every village, so a pie trader should be doing good business, theoretically. He is providing a product that almost anyone might want and asking for a common item in trade. Yet why would you buy a pie from a sketchy dude with a gooseberry fetish, if you can just go over to the bakery and pick-up a fresh pie for free? More importantly, why would you waste time selling pies, when it would be more time-efficient to simply distribute free baskets of pies around the village for anyone who needs the food? Both the pie seller and his potential customers have no reason to trade with each other, beyond role-playing, because capitalism has no role in a community-based village which survives by sharing all resources.

The definition of capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and the operations are funded by profits. Without private property and ownership, many fundamental aspects of trade are completely meaningless. Why bother going through the motions of feeding the pie maker a symbolic gooseberry when you both have important things to do with your time that DON'T involve unnecessarily lengthy trade negotiations? I make the pies. I put them where hungry people can find them. Job done ... on to the next thing. I don't have time or desire to get paid for the pies. My payment is a healthy, non-starving village full of people who are hopefully trying to be as productive as me. In order for trade to develop, the world of OHOL needs to get a lot bigger (or smaller, depending on how you look at it) .... and I don't mean that the villages need to further apart. I mean that the ability to move from one community to a different community needs to be improved. Right now, there is usually just ONE village and that single village is the center of all human existence during your life. There is no outside. There are no other people for you do trade with or go to war with. Right now, most people will be born, live out their entire lives, and die without ever seeing a true "outsider". Everyone in your village is just another villager, part of your village, whether they are of the same lineage or a different one. To get the kind of interactions you are looking for, you need more regional specialization - unique resources that allow one village to be genuinely different from another nearby village - and you need more stream-lined ways for people to travel long distances so they can find and interact meaningfully with their neighbors.

I think it is good that you are trying to make OHOL more like the real world, but I also feel like you might be trying to skip ahead too far and too fast. Don't force it. The systems that naturally develop in OHOL might not perfectly match the complex modern world we live in, but they actually do a pretty amazing job of mirror the kind of systems that have developed in close-nit, isolated communities in the real world.

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