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Glassius

Member

Registered: 2018-04-22

Posts: 326

High resource regen > high resource amount

The current approach is to force people to climb up in technology tree to achieve self sustain city. Resources at virgin area are plentiful, but they must be carefully spent on investing into self sustain based on water pumps and sheeps. That's because they have low regen rate (branches regen and rabbit spawn about 1 hour).

Consider If we turn it upside down, which is decrease the general amount of available resources (rarer trees, less berries, less dense rabbit holes, decrease global pip bonus to food) but increase the regen rate. Consequences
1. Eveing and exploring would be much easier. There would always bee a regenerated food around. So newbies would be better than now outside of camp.
2. The amount of nearby food would be low. So a mother and 2 kids may for example be self sustain using gathering only on constant 20x20 area. But any bigger number of players would quickly deplete area of resources.
3. It would slow down city progress, as resources would be lower. City dwellers would need to explore bigger areas to bring the enormous amount of resources to progress the city.

This still matches everything runs out philosophy. If players want to be self sustain at low level, they would have to keep their population low (like homo sapiens for 400 000 years). The cities would be harder. Yet going outside to setup small outpost and/or teach kids outside of camp would be easier.

It matches well zoom mods (newbies on vanilla gameplay do not explore also because of small view range). If applied with animals slow regeneration (mouflons, bisons, turkeys) it would encourage players to setup small, even temporary outposts.

A badland camp hunting mouflons and managing mine? Sure! Grassland rabbit eaters protecting fur and trading backpacks for threads? Why not!

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jasonrohrer

Administrator

Registered: 2017-02-13

Posts: 4,805

Re: High resource regen > high resource amount

I have thought about this, and it even kinda worked like this long ago.

And for what it's worth, it STILL works that way for wild berry bushes, right?  If you go out and roam alone, you can usually find bits of food along the way.

This is obviously how it works in real life.  There might be enough wild food for a few people in one area, and a slightly larger group can roam around together, but if the population will grow in one location, there needs to be agriculture.

This is the classic Eve Camp Rush that exists in this game.  Wild food in a 30-tile-radius is running out.  We need to balance our population and get infrastructure up and running before we all starve.

A few issues:

--Rarer trees would make the game look a lot worse visually.  Trees look nice, and "flesh out" the landscape.  Maybe just the "branchy" trees could be more rare.  So firewood is plentiful once you get the axe?

--The population never grows beyond some point, so there's an upper limit to how far this technique of increasing pressure can go.  We're never going to get 100 or 1000 people in one village.  There are technical limitations, of course, but even if tech wasn't an issue, it would be utter chaos.  So this kind of limitation can't got "all the way up" the civ tree.  At some point, some other kind of pressure needs to kick in.

--Wandering around looking for stuff isn't that interesting, to me, as a designer.  With the current resource structure, making stuff more rare would require a lot of wandering.  There's a possibility of something more like a "jackpot" structure, where you have to wander for a long time and then find a big cache of fertile soil or whatever.  I'm aware that late-game, as stuff has run out, more wandering happens currently.  I'm not satisfied with this, however....

--Beyond wild food, wood, and water, this is not how it works for any other resource in real life.  Everything else gets permanently exhausted.  Strict realism obviously isn't the goal here, and I've taken some liberties with wood and water in this game already, but having things like iron respawn just feels like a bit too much to me.

--In general, I find rate-based resource limits much harder to balance in the face of an elastic player population.  The population almost doubles between midnight and noon each day.  The game will wobble between too hard and too easy daily, after I pick the best possible rate.  (And the rate could vary with player population, but that would require a substantial engine overhaul).  There is currently some of that easy-hard wobble already, with "everything runs out."  However, even during the "easy" times, everything is still running out long term.  The temporary easiness is just a short-term illusion.

Glassius

Member

Registered: 2018-04-22

Posts: 326

Re: High resource regen > high resource amount

I like a sentence "willing searches for possibilities. Not wiling excuses".

I was not talking about trees, but branches. I live near cultivated city park and my dog is always able to find some sticks to fetch. Also, I was able to find free kindling every time I was making a camping in forest. Just like squaws in native tribes  For me a below flow seems natural
Tree
Tree with branch
Tree with fallen branch
Tree with kindling
Tree (kindling rotted).
This flow would slow down city development why making Eve runs and early settlement easier due to kindling early access

If you balance area to sustain only 2 people, all the other will be balanced about amount of resources, not their respawn. Depletion of resources would hurt even more This way you do not need to worry about regen balance, as only nearly extinct settlements may be able to utilize regen for survival.

Wandering may be not interesting for designer, but it doesn't matter. The amusement of players matters. Making a hunter-gatherer style a valid gameplay adds variety, choices and amusement. Regen balanced for 2 people around area will not affect cities with 5 or more permanent citizens. Notice, that small regen will slightly decrease depletion of resources, giving people more time to notice and react for change in cooperation. But it will also give them harder choices and area to make mistakes and learn.

Iron respawn is utilized in other games by meteors or earthquakes, but don't think about it. Notice, that iron despawn as in OHOL is not immersive either. When IRL we will run out of ore, we will go mine garbage dump. Or filter oceanic water, crash meteors from beyond Mars or reach for Earth core. For OHOL I believe it should not be renewable, just like you. I expect hunter-gatherers to not need iron, why outpost builders are supposed to bring their own tools. But still, I believe OHOL needs a mine update requiring to build an outpost because of complexity of tasks.

Last edited by Glassius (2019-10-26 21:44:23)

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TitaniaDioxide

Member

Registered: 2019-09-18

Posts: 19

Re: High resource regen > high resource amount

I agree that even if wandering isn't interesting for you as a designer, it's really fun as a player.  I like pseudo-Eve-ing.  I like going and exploring to find resources.

I always make sure to help with some farming or smithing or cooking when I'm young, but sometimes I want to experience the beautiful world you've created.  I want to go out and just catch rabbits for a while.  I want to go get a cow, or a pig, or hunt turkeys. Sometimes I want to grab two or three people from town, and go exploring for dead towns to repopulate.  I want to live off the land like I can't in my city in real life.

Seriously, we play games to escape life.  Being able to live somewhat sustainably is a really cool part of OHOL.

The big theme I find among players is that we want options in how to play.  We don't want to be hamstrung into going from one "step" to another, always ending up in a massive, hard-to-destroy town.  We want to be able to hang out in the early game for a while (which is really well fleshed out and really enjoyable).  Or we want to be able to splinter off from our town.

I do think it would be an interesting experiment to set it up so any 40x40 (or 80x80?) square can sustain a fire and wild food for two people indefinitely, maybe even without needing tools except the initial fire bow drill and a sharp rock. 

I think you'd still see towns - people want to be able to make something, after all.  I think you'd still see towns self-sustaining within their walls, for the most part - it gives projects and purpose, and if you only give 2 people per 40x40 squares, there's no way a town could just last off the land. I don't think you'd see anyone just going and camping out in one spot eating all the food alone - that's no fun.  But I do think you'd see more temporary camps being set up, with small amounts of farming.  I think you'd see more whole-world projects, like the roads that someone (tarr?) was making a few weeks ago.  I think you'd see a slowdown of progress up the tech tree, without a complete halt. 

Anyway.  This is a really interesting idea that Glassius brought up.  I think it's a direction I'd like to see the game go.