a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
You are not logged in.
Pages: 1
I know this is the 500th post about how biome restrictions are a bad but lets think about it.
When they were first introduced all the families grouped up into the same village which reduced diversity.
Homeland was added to keep families from doing that.
This spread families out and often the places they settled were not rich enough with specialty biomes to stabilize the family. (Having to travel hundreds of tiles to get anything makes a weak town)
Thus we get banding. Making it impossible for a family to settle outside of their biome region. I personally dont mind banding that much but it does cause a couple issues in my opinion.
First, it makes the map pretty boring and relatively monotonous. It removes a lot of diversity and it takes all skill out of finding a "good spot". That being said most eves didnt search for good locations before settling before the change anyway.
Second, it makes things way too easy with regards to oil. Oil is a no brainer now and its easy to pump out tons of it with little effort.
What im seeing is the locust level oil production is driving gingers further and further west while most of the remaining families can remain static. Im seeing gingers 2-5k west of the other families pretty consistently. It also makes it unstable for ginger eves to resettle old towns in areas where tarry spots are tapped.
What im seeing from biome restrictions as a whole and the bandaids that have been added is: further reduction in diversity, further spread of families, and less overall stability for ginger towns and families. I also see ginger towns get stripped of all their resources as soon as they die out.
Currently late game towns cannot exist without a strong ginger family and basically the entire stability of the server rests on their shoulders.
Is this good? Personally i think it was better when families had access to everything and their stability rested exclusively on their shoulders. The whole biome restriction thing is just a time suck and puts everything behind gates. It would be nice to spawn into a family and be able to really make a difference for them without the hoop jumping. Or being required to /die until your ginger so the server doesnt run out of oil.
I dont see much trading. Especially towards gingers. I spawned into the same ginger town a couple times over the course of 24 hours and no new palm oil or sulfur was obtained in that time. Yet over 30 tanks of oil had cycled to the other fams. Often due to looting after the families had died.
The only reason we see any form of stability with these systems is due to phex users. Another bandaid.
This problem is cut too deep to be solved with bandaids. We need stitches or possibly surgery to fix this issue. What was the issue again that promoted biome restrictions in the first place?
Offline
I believe reason was adding something that pushes you out from your town. I think cravings would do the same with better effects.
Offline
What was the issue again that promoted biome restrictions in the first place?
Trade? Diplomacy? Road-building? Challenge? This is the news post that described them when "family speciality" was added.
https://i.imgur.com/uocNfD8.png
The specialty biomes, which spawn sporadically in the center of the topographic map rings, include the jungle, arctic, and desert. In this update, each of these biomes is assigned to one specialist family skin tone---they are the only people who are comfortable working there. The other families must depend on this specialist family for help in getting necessary resources from this otherwise inhospitable area. Fortunately, the resources found in these special biomes aren't needed until the later stages of a developing civilization. Thus, families can live and work in isolation for a while before they are eventually forced to find each other and cooperate through trade.
While there are only three specialty biomes, there are currently four family skin tones. The fourth skin tone has no biome specialty, but gains the polylingual ability to communicate with all the other families, so they can help with the coordination and trading efforts.
The general idea here is that as your village climbs the tech tree, you should face new and more complex challenges, including challenges that involve social interactions like negotiation and diplomacy. Transportation networks between towns will go from an entertaining diversion to a necessary component for group survival.
Specialists can also build roads and buildings in their biome to make it traversable and hospitable for other families, so trading posts and gathering areas are possible.
To go along with these changes, some new content has been added in these biomes, with a new biome-locking feature ensuring that you have to visit those biomes to interact with that content. For example, you have to visit the jungle in order to get a tattoo, and only a jungle specialist can perform the procedure for you.
From what I recall, the main point was to stimulate trade and interaction between groups on a larger scale. Jason wanted to see wars, city walls, private property, commerce, diplomacy, resource exchanges and much much more. And he wanted it now.
Biome restrictions were a quick and dirty way to force trade into the game meta and make town survive more complex over time.
Offline
First off, they are not biome restrctions as biomes are not restricted. They are character restrictions on the basis of the race of the character (and having at least 15 players on a server).
Yes, biome banding is just another bandaid.
Yesterday I brought a horse to Groots (ginger) as a Dolly, black, when Groots were still an Eve camp basically and then made them their first carts in town. Then later I brought 6 buckets of latex, 2 buckets of palm kernels, a few bananas, two stacks of sugar cane, and some peppercorns to Groots as a Casablanca, tan/brown, also. Much, but not all, of the time I end up traveling between towns and gifting things to towns like that.
I don't doubt that others go around gifting as the Ginger deliveries prove. I think fewer players care as much as they use to about family since race restrictions.
Biome banding also makes it very easy for players to find old towns. That cheapens/ruins rebuilding from scratch. Like last night I got born to a White Eve. I helped her find a spot. I worked on steel tools and early game stuff. It was worth it just so that there existed more iron unlocked. But, I kept getting birth messages from like 400 or 500 meters to the right, since one of my family members had resettled east. I had also gotten born in a white family a few days before with just a few of us around and much of the family somewhere else. I got born once to a white mom who was trying to resettle Aa's old town in a truck, though fortunately I knew the way back to the new place, I still found it disappointing that I had to end up in the old town instead of the new and developing one.
Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-11-15 16:31:06)
Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.
Offline
Another problem here lies in that there might not exist any experts for one of the three specialty biomes ... or the only character with a specialty plays in Donkey Town. Even with around 40 players on a server. And player count often enough gets around 20 and even below 20 in the dark hours of the morning EST. It's at least worth considering just getting water from ponds instead of doing rubber (people recommended this back before expert waystones). Also, not only does kerosene get looted, rubber tires will sometimes get looted. The whole system might even get crashed by a dedicated group of players who first killed off a tan lineage, and then kept on targeting the new Eve lineages.
I found this thread with Jason saying this from April of 2019:
I guess part of what I'm trying to do here is figure out a way to bring villages closer together without it degenerating into one big "mush" of civilization, or without short-circuiting the idea that a village really will be lost if it dies out.
The fact that a village can get lost does make people care. And makes people care about the last female child in the village, etc. "You are our miracle"
However, I fear that I cannot have it both ways. Villages can't be close enough to interact AND still get lost when they die out. I mean, not without "magic" of some kind (where the village is insta-wiped as soon as the last family member dies).
I guess this is an interesting way to frame the problem. Instead of thinking about a lack of drama, or story variety, or war, we can think just about that problem. How can villages be close together and still lost when they die out?
Well, the answer is there is no way of doing that. Villages can't be close together and still lost when they die out.
Also:
The other thing that should be pointed out here is that, during the first month of the game, before the Eve spreading stuff was added, the death of a family didn't matter at all, because it didn't result in towns being lost. There was a map of the whole civilized world. You could always find your way back. Remember checkered floor roads?
I think the game is much better now than it was back then, because there is something on the line. We can screw this up, folks, and all this will be lost. And this does lead to more interesting stories. As the last elders dies out in a childless village, there's a real feeling there.... a real sense of despair.
So, more interesting, dramatic stories in individual towns, but less interesting, long-term stories between neighboring towns.
But, there are NO long-term stories between neighboring towns these days, if there ever has been. Stanley Wisenut donating 4 bowls of sulfur to the Joys, and then Steven Joy leaving buckets of latex and palm oil at the Joys a few generations later don't have connections or create any sort of long-term story... they are too disjointed of events. Looting of a dead town is even worse. It's just not a story at all between towns. And when people ROLEPLAY "trade", deliberately trying to do things inefficiently with negotiation, it's a one shot deal, with no trade at one point in time connecting to another between families.
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … 042#p52042
Towns just don't get lost. Rebuilding from scratch is a joke.
If all villages are close together, or people are using sniffed map coordinates, and they can just walk back to it in a few days, the village really didn't die, and the drama that occurred leading up to that death is weakened. It wasn't real. There was no real danger of loss. We can get this village back online any time we want. No big deal.
I'm trying to fill this game with big deals. Difficult decisions. Far-reaching consequences.
Yeah, Jason said that. But, no, seeing as that got written in April of 2019, and it's now a year and a half later, that simply wasn't what he was doing.
Fuck the desire for "trade" in this game. It's a waste of time. It demotivates from players from caring about their families to caring about the other family over. It demotivates rebuilding from scratch. Fuck closeness of families. It cheapens rebuilding from scratch.
Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-11-19 08:22:05)
Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.
Offline
Pages: 1
