Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

Strilar · 2023-07-18 17:27:55

Hello, i'm pretty happy to see that the playerbase has been increasing a lot lately, specially with the Steams sale boom, apparently we keep having new players every single day which is awesome. :-) I appologise in advance for the long post, i don't write much here because i tend to elaborate when i discuss a topic and was hoping others would mention it too.

The amount of griefing also seems to have been reduced thanks to the latest several updates so in the past several weeks i've been doing my best to help and teach every new players I find becoming a "teacher/mentor" by profession.

However, i've noticed a problematic pattern that keeps repeating over and over, that I feel it's overwhelming both to veteran players and also to new players... baby boom!

Players keep having way too many babies, and very close to each other with no cooldown at all, not only that but lives with eight or maybe more babies are not uncommon (i've had many of those already) and you can see many of these problems in one of Twisted recent videos here:

https://youtu.be/3U589C33Y_Y

To keep all babies alive, many players have been just spending a lot of time in nursery until they are too old to have more, since every time they step outside, a new one is born. This is not a good experience and is stressful to to everyone involved.

To a new player who doesn't know what to do, having many babies being born (and many dying because of /die or starvation) causes them to panic.
To a veteran player, they receive a message "hey this player is new, can you teach them the game?" but then we can't because we have four more babies right after it (and more may be new players too). Often we can't even dress or pick a baby to name it before another shows up. Twisted is a very experience player and also mentions this in the video above at 35:56 "This is actually exausting", almost half an hour trying to keep babies alive and at 45:59 "babies make teaching so hard"

So, I propose that we should have a baby cooldown, at least a minute, or maybe even two. Give us some time to give some attention to a baby before we have another one. (SID babies shouldn't count obviously so a griefer can't die and prevent mom from having kids that want to live)

Next, I would like to say that personally I hate the /die command, I understand why it exists, we can't force players to play where they don't want to, but is has only been giving negative playing experiences. Having a kid is usually a moment of joy, but having it die in your arms as soon as you stop everything you're doing to pick it up, is not. New players also keep wondering how they screw up and let their baby die.

If a player uses /die then they shouldn't be allowed to be born again on the same mother, or even the same family. It happened many times that I had three or four SID babies in a row in less than a minute. This happened at late hours when few players on the server too, so i'm sure many of times it was the same player. If you decide to /die because you don't want to be in that family, that's fine, but then you shouldn't be able to return there in that generation.

The great amount of SID babies also cause a lot of baby skeletons to clutter the place, which is also not a new or pretty image for a new player and also clutters the whole ground so we can't even drop anything, specially since nurseries are small to preserve heat. Baby bones should disappear very quickly, like 10 seconds instead of 2 minutes. For all intents and purposes the SID baby is like it was never born anyway and this prevents a single player to leave 5 skeletons because he used /slash die five times in less than a minute. In my opinion, they shouldn't even show up on website's family tree.

This is a game of parenting and civilization building, we can't build if we have eight kids unless we ignore them (something I would never do), and we can't spend any time doing much with our moms or kids because there are four mouths to feed. The more kids one has, the lesser should be the chance of having a new one (again, SID babies shouldn't count).

I also propose that there should be a max limit of the number of babies a mom should have, this will allow other moms to have more kids, even if their conditions are worst, or even let more Eves be born to start new families. (often we only have one family of each of the four speciality families)

Moms should also have some ability to decide not to have more kids if they have many already, so how about a maximum of 4 non-SID babies per mom as default? And you can increase that limit by 1 per each craving you eat as adult. So if you eat two cravings, you can have up to 6 kids, if you don't want to have more so you can focus on your 4 sons and daughters then you don't eat more cravings.

Finally, because this post is already a huge text, because people will counter-argue about needing more fertile babies, there could be an algorithm to calculate if currently a whole family has no females under 40, then next kid is 100% sure to be female to assure a family doesn't die just of bad luck with male kids.

Males are very important and useful too, and i'm a bit tired of people discriminating them or making them sound useless. And using /die just because you were born as a male seems to go against the overal philosophy of this game.

Thanks for your patience in reading my suggestions, and I look forward to read your polite responses.

Shady · 2023-07-19 03:52:13

I agree partly, childbirth usually happens over an 8-month period so its abit weird to have a bunch of children at once. I don't think there should be a child limit because they got people with 8 babies out there.

CatX · 2023-07-19 09:08:12

Cluttered spaces are a big problem for the inexperienced. I agree SID skeletons should vanish quicker.

Maybe we should create a habit where moms are not necessarily the teachers? In some towns long ago there were school buildings, but they were never in use when I saw them. I don't know how effective they were in bringing teachers and students together.

But we could make a habit of taking grown children to the garden or kitchen, locating a farmer or cook and ask them to teach our kids. Or, idk, we could say feathered fur hats are teachers' hats, and if you wear one you signify that you want that role. It might work with no griefers around...

Obviously Jason doesn't want this, but I don't think a pregnancy system would hurt the game, where the mother knows she is potentially pregnant while the fetus can choose to /die before being born after a few seconds of watching the town.

And I don't think anyone else will like this last suggestion, but I think it's worth mentioning:

Give men the ability to have children on rare occasions. If all the women are old and there's a young man, let him have a baby. It's a fantasy game, so why not, especially if it solves a problem.

fug · 2023-07-19 11:13:32

Unfortunately with how things are changed and not exactly explained somewhere easy to keep track of mechanics I believe the current is supposed to be the current version:

Fertile female should have a current max of four living children. If she has four living kids she specifically shouldn't be having more unless none of the other mothers/females in the village can produce a kid. If your kid dies you should have a small cooldown, but if your kid /dies then your cooldown is instantly reset.

If there's too many babies to adults the game should spawn an Eve (this is why on server reset we get a bunch of Eves.) to help the adult to baby ratio.

The /die probably comes from having no feedback if you're blocked to a family because after the first cycle of /dying in each family you will randomly bounce around. Are you hitting white town because you're cursed? Or are you hitting white town because they've got a lot of fertiles + yum/warmth. Maybe instead of random you just always cycle the families by color? G > W > T > B. You would be able to tell you're cursed from a family in this situation because you'll skip over a family or be specifically stuck in one. This doesn't stop /die spam but it makes it easier to both see if you're cursed out and stops one mom from getting the same dude 4 times trying to go elsewhere (unless they're blocked.) Of course if multiple people are using /die it can seem like the same person keeps popping up.

Teaching wise just dump babies on the town wet nurse. There always seems to be that one dude afk or chilling by the fire and then take hopefully an older character as a student. They're usually the types to sort of stare blankly or moms will ask for teachers. Obviously males not spitting out kids have an easier time teaching other teens/adults but women can just dump their kids in the fire.

Random babies are sort of half the fun because it's a clear "Oh shit!" moment that's not troll related. While he made the pregnant belly I don't see it actually coming. Bones despawning faster would be nice since you can change sids bones to normal bones with a little troll magic.

Strilar · 2023-07-19 12:56:54

shady wrote:

I don't think there should be a child limit because they got people with 8 babies out there.

I didn't said it should be impossible to have 8 babies, just more unlikely, as each time you had a kid, your chances to have another should be lowered.
Yes, there are people with 8 babies out there, but most parents don't have the means or conditions to support so many, hence why I suggested that the minimum limit should be 4, and each craving increases your limit.

This would prevent an Eve from having so many kids she can barely move, give players some choice if they want to keep having some more kids or not, and support the idea that if you have enough wealth/resources (access to more different food) you are in better conditions to support a bigger family.

CatX wrote:

Maybe we should create a habit where moms are not necessarily the teachers?
(...)
But we could make a habit of taking grown children to the garden or kitchen(...)

fug wrote:

Teaching wise just dump babies on the town wet nurse.
(...)
but women can just dump their kids in the fire

I think you may be missing the whole point of this... this is a game about parenting and family, I WANT to be able spend time with my family, with my brothers/sisters, with my nephews/nieces, if a new baby is born and i get the message "hey this player is new, please teach him?" I like to have the responsibility and ability to do so (besides babies are people and not objects to be "dumped").

What's the point of having kids if we're just going to give them to someone else to take care of them? If you want to do that, that's your choice, but I don't even have the choice of giving my kids a city tour to show where smith or farm is because 3 more popped out crying "F" before i got the chance to name and dress my first one.

Finally, because people in the forum usually tend to be experienced players, I feel they often forget to put themselves in a new player's shoes, if this is your first few lives, you may not know what to do with your kids, having just one or two may be manageable, but being overwhelmed will cause the player to panic and stress.

I already had a perfect example of a new player I've met that was new and we had a great experience together because I was able to teach her the game, she asked me for my discord and I accepted (something i rarely do) so we could be born as twins and start a new life together so I could teach her more.
Problem was, we were both born as female twins, i had 8 kids and she had 7, we spent all the time running back to nursery, she even lost a few kids, i was unable to teach her anything, and by the end of it she was so stressed out, she didn't want to play another life and as far as i know she hasn't played since. This is not a good experience.

CatX wrote:

Give men the ability to have children on rare occasions. If all the women are old and there's a young man, let him have a baby. It's a fantasy game, so why not, especially if it solves a problem.

First, because it's a game, doesn't mean it's "fantasy" yes we have some stuff like headless horsemen and apocalypse statues but 95% of the game is made to be as realistic as possible and a portrait of society and how people interact and evolve, each crafting process is as real as Jason can make it and I think that's great, we learn a lot with this game.

Second, both men and female have their pros and cons, and that also allows a different game experience, females usually stay around city evolving it and keeping it in good shape, while men can go out hunting, risking their lives exploring or trading with other cities etc because of it, which also emulates how society usually evolved in the past. And as mentioned, men also have more time to be teachers since they don't have to worry about being interrupted every minute with childbirth.

Shady · 2023-07-19 13:04:07

Woman can have children every year if they conceive one, and men can't give birth.

CatX · 2023-07-19 13:34:16

Strilar, I agree with a lot of what you say. But there is another thread where players express frustration when towns die out because there are too few women. It seems it's hard to find the right balance between enough babies and giving people time to teach/explore/build/play. A solution to your concern might amplify theirs.

As for males giving birth, it's fantasy to have Eves pop up from nowhere and give birth without males around. But it doesn't break the immersion for me, and saving the town from dying by letting a male produce a baby wouldn't bother me either. To me it's just a matter of finding solutions. Maybe that would lessen the burden on the women just enough that fewer babies per woman wouldn't endanger the town.

Strilar · 2023-07-19 19:00:10

CatX wrote:

Strilar, I agree with a lot of what you say. But there is another thread where players express frustration when towns die out because there are too few women. It seems it's hard to find the right balance between enough babies and giving people time to teach/explore/build/play. A solution to your concern might amplify theirs.

I addressed that in my initial post, so i'll quote myself for easy reference here:

Strilar wrote:

Finally, because this post is already a huge text, because people will counter-argue about needing more fertile babies, there could be an algorithm to calculate if currently a whole family has no females under 40, then next kid is 100% sure to be female to assure a family doesn't die just of bad luck with male kids.

If the game guarantees that a family will always have a female baby if there's no young woman in the entire family then if a city dies out it's because we didn't took good care of our kids, not because we only had male babies. The game already has an algorithm to try to populate more babies in families with lesser population so i don't see why not add this clause too.

I'm only asking for a baby cooldown here, 1 or maybe 2 minutes, we are fertile in game from 15 to 40 if i'm not mistaken, that's plenty of time for you to have eight or more babies if you need or wish for more kids you can just eat more cravings to raise your limit. My suggestion was up to 4 kids limit if you never eat any craving, if you manage to eat 10 cravings, then you can have up to 14 kids.
Pregnancy lasts 9 months and it's a rare thing for a mom to get pregnant again right on the 10th month.

And again, think about the new players, so we want their experience to be being most of the time in nursery and getting stressed when their 6th kid is born? I lived 5 lives today, every single life i had new players around and tried to teach them, 3 of those lives, i couldn't teach a basic thing like making a carrot farm or making clay bowls because new player was female and kept having babies so we ran back to nursery to give them clothes, once baby had hair, we came back to farm/clay place... new baby pops out... back to nursery...

Oh, and as a sidenote, i would like to ask a request to the community.. if you see a player teaching other, let the new player DO stuff, don't do it for them, let them practice and learn, often i prepare everything in an isolated spot to try to teach, someone else shows up and does the job for us, that's just not nice, at least ask "want help?" before you take things from under their feet. Please show some common courtesy and respect for others.

CatX · 2023-07-19 20:52:24

Strilar, there is one thing the algorithm cannot control and that is how many players are available. I have been in towns that were buzzing with life when I was born, but by the time I became an elder only a few people remained. Incoming players will rarely be evenly distributed through the time we are pregnant. And out of the children we raise, some are boys and some will not live to adulthood. As much as I agree that too many babies is stressful, sending them to other towns might mean that by the time we are ready for new babies, no player is available to give birth to.

I'm not saying you are wrong. I fully understand and agree. But I do not think it is a simple algorithm to program. Tweak it for certain scenarios, and it will negatively impact other scenarios.

CatX · 2023-07-19 21:06:00

There is another solution, but Jason turned that down long ago: A baby sling could let us carry a baby and work/teach at the same time. It would let us spend less time in the nursery (which I guess would turn into a wardrobe). Babies could learn from watching us from the very start.

Strilar · 2023-07-19 23:08:40

CatX wrote:

Strilar, there is one thing the algorithm cannot control and that is how many players are available. I have been in towns that were buzzing with life when I was born, but by the time I became an elder only a few people remained. Incoming players will rarely be evenly distributed through the time we are pregnant. And out of the children we raise, some are boys and some will not live to adulthood. As much as I agree that too many babies is stressful, sending them to other towns might mean that by the time we are ready for new babies, no player is available to give birth to.

I apologize but i still fail to understand what you mean, this is about baby boom, when there are many players available and being born at the same time, when there are very few players available (at certain hours due to timezones) then there is no baby boom at all, don't think much would change from what it is now. If 2 babies are born at the same minute, one family can get one daughter and another family can get the 2nd daughter which is better than giving 2 kids to one mom and zero to another.

How is that having a limit of 4 babies (that you can increase by eating cravings) affect low population times?

If there's only 3 players in a city, 2 males and 1 female and we guarantee that the female has a daughter, the city can live on and can actually focus on helping that daughter for 1 minute and not let her die because two other sons were born at basically the same time, we don't need 2 daughters to be born in less than 1 minute. That mom had a total of 25 minutes (from 15 to 40) to have kids if she had her first daughter at age 20, she can have another at age 21 or 22... still plenty of time for more babies to be born. Are you claiming whole cities would die because of no fertiles because she was unavailable to give birth for a single minute to a second daughter??

If there are 2 females and 1 male, Mom "A" has a kid, the other Mom "B" can still get a kid while the 1st one is on baby cooldown for 1 minute, much better than putting all the pressure and responsibility on a single mom, don't you think?

CatX wrote:

There is another solution, but Jason turned that down long ago: A baby sling could let us carry a baby and work/teach at the same time. It would let us spend less time in the nursery (which I guess would turn into a wardrobe). Babies could learn from watching us from the very start.

This is no solution at all... again, the problem here is about "baby boom" having too many kids at once, if you have 3 kids in less than 2 minutes, you cannot carry all of them in a sling can you? Also you need to feed them, get them dressed, and you can't even talk to your kids properly when you have 3 or 4 around you saying "F" at the same time. If i only have one baby, then i don't need a sling to bring him with me, i can just hold him and bring him to wherever i'm working, but if another one is born right away we're back to where we started.

Last edited by Strilar (2023-07-20 02:31:18)

CatX · 2023-07-20 14:15:15

A baby sling might help in the sense that you do not have to rush to the nursery, you can continue teaching your older child. But yes, if you get two babies at once the problem remains.

And yes, I suspect that even when population is high, a family could die out. Sometimes people die by accident, or they're bored and leave early, or they travel away from town for various reasons. We can know that at this time of day we usually have this many players, but we can't know that another player will be born the next five minutes that will want to stay in town.

However - nothing I say should be taken to mean that your problem should not be solved. I hope Jason looks into it. I don't think I have anything else to add to this discussion

Lunargrl2003 · 2023-07-22 13:55:17

i just read your post and i like some of your ideas and agree with you! very well thought out.

Strilar · 2023-07-22 14:36:09

Thank you for having the patience to read my long posts and giving your feedback.

I don't post often, preferring to spend my time in game and helping people, so when I do, i try to elaborate in detail the problems I felt or noticed in game.

However, if only I claim it to be a problem then that's a "me" problem, and not a problem with the game, hence why I like to discuss it with the community so that together we may give feedback to try to improve this game we love.

No single player should cry for a change if other's don't agree with it. So the more people agreeing about a change, the more likely it may happen (if Jason agrees with the feedback too of course, it's still his game and vision after all)

spad · 2023-07-26 17:49:33

I am soooooo tired of baby spamming I often /die when I'm born a woman. To me its one of the biggest problems in the game, every time you trying to teach or do very vital work for the village, they come non stop and half of them just go afk and starve at age 6.

I think it would be nice if the leader could assign to a woman a role like "TEACHER" that would make her not fertile for a little while, and also a role like "WORKER" that would make her not fertile until she decides to change it by saying "I RESIGN".

Would be nice to be able to pump oil as a ginger woman, or if the town is in peril to be able to save it without being interrupted non stop. Of course there needs to be restrictions like 1 per family and enough fertiles.

Marquis · 2023-07-27 00:56:48

spad wrote:

I am soooooo tired of baby spamming I often /die…

And that is what’s called a positive feedback loop. :)

Strilar · 2023-07-27 16:33:06

Once again, when i was still a baby and couldn't feed myself, I inherited Leader and Property, and as soon as i was old enough i kept getting babies, i had three in a row (none of them were twins) confirming there's no baby cooldown, and ended up having 7 babies total, two of them were new players (the game told me so) that i was unable to help or teach much because again, before any of them grew hair and was old enough to do something, i had yet another baby in my arms.

Between seven babies, listening to village giving me feedback about possible griefers, issuing orders when needed and having to go to property gate to open it or give ownership because village needed things within, i barely "played" at all until i was 40 and did no "parenting" besides giving name and clothes to my babies, 7 kids and i was barely able to spend any time with any of them.

In my previous life, my mom was a new player, and didn't know what to do, when i was born in nursery. she already had two other babies there, and more showed up before i was 4 old and able to feed myself. Thanks to other players, i don't think any died (except the /die ones in her arms) but i could tell she was panicking and being very stressed about it. I even tried to teach her about yum and farming once i was able to speak more than a word, but because she had even more babies, she kept going back to nursery.

So yeah... i came to repeat myself: Can we have a baby cooldown and baby limit please?
In high population times, the baby boom is too much both for veteran and for new players and it doesn't provide a good experience for anyone involved.

Give parents a chance to spend some time with their kids please.

Last edited by Strilar (2023-07-27 16:36:52)

Brohop · 2023-07-27 16:42:38

What if there is a situation that all fertiles have been having loads of kids, would you want the game to prevent someone from login in directly?

Strilar · 2023-07-27 17:49:47

Brohop wrote:

What if there is a situation that all fertiles have been having loads of kids, would you want the game to prevent someone from login in directly?

Already answered that in my initial post:

Strilar wrote:

I also propose that there should be a max limit of the number of babies a mom should have, this will allow other moms to have more kids, even if their conditions are worst, or even let more Eves be born to start new families. (often we only have one family of each of the four speciality families)

No player would ever be prevented from logging in directly, if there's no mom available at that exact moment, they are born as an Eve to start a new family.

This would actually be a good thing to encourage new cities, since Eves usually only spawn when server updates and kills everyone (something that i also think is a major problem, but have no idea how that can be fixed) and because all cities are now empty and dead, the new Eves often just move back after the update in to occupy them. At high population times, we could have a big jungle family in a big city and a newish jungle family starting a new village.

Last edited by Strilar (2023-07-27 17:50:57)

bpskotch · 2023-07-29 06:52:49

I'm just gonna drag out the elephant in the room on this issue. The main issue I see, and have seen for a long time, is simply the constant fluctuation in player count, and constantly trying to accomodate for wildly different scenarios as a set rule, which always influences one positively while impacting the other negatively. In this case of course, I'm referring to the balancing act between ensuring families have enough babies to maintain them, while also not overwhelming players with too many children.

Strilar wrote:

I also propose that there should be a max limit of the number of babies a mom should have, this will allow other moms to have more kids, even if their conditions are worst, or even let more Eves be born to start new families. (often we only have one family of each of the four speciality families)

Normally I agree with this sentiment, of having more families and more diversification in places to be born. Except, the population numbers come into play. We've all seen it: When there are two competing families of the same race, inevitably one dies shortly after the introduction of the second. There is simply not enough player base to maintain more than 4 families at any given time, nevermind having more than that. But the harsh reality is that this game is likely never going to see the population numbers needed to feasibly maintain that quantity of families.

So in summary, do I think your suggestion is a bad one? No, but I believe that in the game's current state (which is not likely to change), it would as others have stated, further lead towards family death due to a lack of fertile players. As it is, famlies are dying left and right and its not always due to neglect. There's a ton of factors that lead to a family's demise, and a modified cooldown would only worsen the state of that, in my opinion.

Another point I would like to address, regarding SIDS. You may already know this, but the biggest reason it exists is because without it, said children would become "runner babies" instead of using SIDS, which is equally just as bad of an experience to players if you ask me, except worse as it tanks your gene score (if you care about it). I do however agree that it would be nice to prevent the same baby from being born to the same mother they have already /die'ed away from.

I also agree that the sling is not really the long term fix to the issue, as it only acts as small buffer and doesn't solve the larger problem as a whole.

Pros and cons to approaches on this issue:

1. Add cooldown to births, as OP suggested.
Pros: More time to breathe between children, even if not perfect, a slight chance to at least interact with each individual child somewhat.
Cons: Effectively locks down the potential list of mothers, depending on the timing of things. Could lead to situations where there are no valid places to birth if everyone is on cooldown, unless...
2. Allow for additional Eve spawns when birth rates are high.
Pros: More diversification in areas to be born. Sense of identity to a family beyond color. Allows more players the chance to experience Eve.
Cons: More Eves = more families = an already small player count being even further split and increasing the odds of families dying due to lack of players/fertiles. Only really practical in a high player count situation.
3. Cap the number of babies a mother can have.
Pros: A hard limit could certainly give much more flexibility in spending time with children.
Cons: Again, could run into situations where there are no more valid fertile females, which could lead to either approach #2, or players having to be artifically made to wait before being born.

Anyways, I'm rambling at this point. Hopefully this post brings a bit more insight on things, and emphasizes the fact that there is no quick fix or easy solution to this issue, and would likely require some degree of overhaul on the system as a whole (which, again is not very likely at this point).

Strilar · 2023-07-29 09:39:10

Thank you for having the patience to read the issue and for providing civil and constructive feedback.

bpskotch wrote:

I'm just gonna drag out the elephant in the room on this issue. The main issue I see, and have seen for a long time, is simply the constant fluctuation in player count, and constantly trying to accomodate for wildly different scenarios as a set rule, which always influences one positively while impacting the other negatively. In this case of course, I'm referring to the balancing act between ensuring families have enough babies to maintain them, while also not overwhelming players with too many children.

Sure, i agree that when making any changes we should be careful not to cause more problems so pros and cons should be considered, this however has already been mentioned in this conversation, these changes would mostly only affect during high population times (when families can have 30+ allies) and cause no problems in low population times (when families have 6- allies), the baby limit shouldn't affect low population times at all, and like i said, it's not a hard limit, as players could increase that limit by eating cravings, as for cooldown, as long as we guarantee that each family has at least 1 fertile woman, they won't die out of "bad luck". We don't need TWO daughters to be born from the same mother in less than 1-2 minutes for that family to survive.

bpskotch wrote:

Normally I agree with this sentiment, of having more families and more diversification in places to be born. Except, the population numbers come into play. We've all seen it: When there are two competing families of the same race, inevitably one dies shortly after the introduction of the second. There is simply not enough player base to maintain more than 4 families at any given time, nevermind having more than that. But the harsh reality is that this game is likely never going to see the population numbers needed to feasibly maintain that quantity of families.
So in summary, do I think your suggestion is a bad one? No, but I believe that in the game's current state (which is not likely to change), it would as others have stated, further lead towards family death due to a lack of fertile players. As it is, famlies are dying left and right and its not always due to neglect. There's a ton of factors that lead to a family's demise, and a modified cooldown would only worsen the state of that, in my opinion.

Based on what i've seen, it does seem the server population HAS been increasing, as i keep finding new players everyday, and steam sales recently did brought a lot more people to the game. We want to keep these new players in, and at least in one example i saw a new player quit after her 2nd life because of this issue which made me sad. (she was extremely stressed for having way too many babies and barely leaving nursery providing a non-fun experience) We want the player population to grown, hence why i've mostly been focusing on the experience for new players.

If one family dies shortly after the introduction of the second, that's a problem we should analyze exactly why it happens, i certainly don't believe it would be because of a 1-2 min cooldown as the birth algorithm already seems to take into account of spawning babies on low-pop families as you can see in detail in this update here. As long as each family always has a fertile, it's up to the players to try to assure that family survives.

Here's the most relevant part:

Jason wrote:

Our highest priority in placing a baby should be to make sure there's at least one family in each of the specialist skin tones, and if all of them are already present, bolster the population of the weakest skin tone. After that, our next priority is to bolster the population of the weakest family, and place girl babies when the number of potentially fertile females in a given family gets too low. Of course, we also want to respect each mother's birth cool-down when possible, and also each player's previous-life area bans (so they don't get born to the same family over and over). But we should also be willing to ignore cool-downs and area bans if there are no other mothers available. No one should be able to area ban themselves, through suicide, into being an Eve, and we'd rather overload a mother on cool-down than spawn an Eve.
Finally, we need to make sure that the server is never overloaded with babies relative to the adult population (more than 2/3 babies), nor that a few remaining mothers are overloaded with babies (more than 4 babies per mother).

This looks great to me, but for some reason it's not working anymore as there's no cooldown and mothers are being overloaded with babies. I see no other update where this was changed. The only alteration i think that's needed in this algorithm is to assure with 100% that if a baby is born in a family with no other fertiles besides that mom, that baby would be born as a female so families don't die out of "bad luck" of having 3 boys and no girls.

bpskotch wrote:

Another point I would like to address, regarding SIDS. You may already know this, but the biggest reason it exists is because without it, said children would become "runner babies" instead of using SIDS, which is equally just as bad of an experience to players if you ask me, except worse as it tanks your gene score (if you care about it). I do however agree that it would be nice to prevent the same baby from being born to the same mother they have already /die'ed away from.

I've stated this many times already, at no point in all this conversation did i ever suggested /die should be removed in any way. I don't like /die command but i do understand why it exists, i'm just bothered with the 2min cooldown skeleton spamming and with having the same player being born and dying in a mom's arms over and over. Nothing of what i suggested would cause "runner babies" again.

This whole conversation about /die has been discussed here but to bring it here, here's what i suggested:

Strilar wrote:

1) If a player chooses to /die in a family, they shouldn't be born again as a kid from anyone with the same family name
(thus we respect player choice of not wanting to be there, and we don't grief families with many SID babies from just a single player)
2) SID baby skeletons should disappear after 10sec on the ground and not 2min
(this avoid nurseries, kitchens and other work places from being cluttered with many dead bodies that for all intents and purposes never were born in the first place)
(...)
If a player uses /die in a family then they shouldn't be allowed to be born in that same family name again, they obviously don't want to be born there and the family is only suffering from a spam of SID babies, if you cycle through all available families then you're born as an Eve, at the COST of having spent several "lives" each time you /died and reducing your genetic score (if you want to play alone then you're not a good fit to inherit leader or properties anyway)
(...)
Assuming there's only one of each four specialist families at the moment, at max it would cost the player 3 lives using /die to spawn where they wanted, instead of costing them many more lives because they keep respawning to the same mom they didn't wanted to be with. How is this not a win-win for both sides?

I repeat the question: How is this not a win-win for both sides?

bpskotch wrote:

I also agree that the sling is not really the long term fix to the issue, as it only acts as small buffer and doesn't solve the larger problem as a whole.

Yeah, adding new items to the game that won't solve the problem is just unnecessary extra work for the developer. even if we could put our single baby in our backpack to avoid crafting new useless items, i still would interrupt my work and want to take him to nursery to give him clothes so having him on my arms or back wouldn't change much, and if i got as soon as i got baby dressed and tried to return to work (because of no-cooldown) i would be turning back to nursery to dress the 2nd baby.

Note: It is fine to have our work interrupted by birth, it's part of the game and life, and make us appreciate how much our mothers had to sacrifice sometimes just to take care of us, still because of the problems stating above, spending over half your life staying or going to nursery because you're a female is not a good experience.

bpskotch wrote:

Pros and cons to approaches on this issue:
1. Add cooldown to births, as OP suggested.
Pros: More time to breathe between children, even if not perfect, a slight chance to at least interact with each individual child somewhat.
Cons: Effectively locks down the potential list of mothers, depending on the timing of things. Could lead to situations where there are no valid places to birth if everyone is on cooldown, unless...
2. Allow for additional Eve spawns when birth rates are high.
Pros: More diversification in areas to be born. Sense of identity to a family beyond color. Allows more players the chance to experience Eve.
Cons: More Eves = more families = an already small player count being even further split and increasing the odds of families dying due to lack of players/fertiles. Only really practical in a high player count situation.
3. Cap the number of babies a mother can have.
Pros: A hard limit could certainly give much more flexibility in spending time with children.
Cons: Again, could run into situations where there are no more valid fertile females, which could lead to either approach #2, or players having to be artifically made to wait before being born.
Anyways, I'm rambling at this point. Hopefully this post brings a bit more insight on things, and emphasizes the fact that there is no quick fix or easy solution to this issue, and would likely require some degree of overhaul on the system as a whole (which, again is not very likely at this point).

Well stated!
Point 1 has no Cons because there's always a valid place to be born if everyone is on cooldown (as Eve), and even in High Population times i feel it wouldn't happen all that often, it would just allow other moms to have more babies (since priority is given to those who ate more cravings, have better temperature, etc)

Point 2 is the most relevant Con as it could lead to more families with less people, but as long as each family always have at least one fertile, i don't think it's a bad thing.

Point 3 states "players having to wait before being born" which is again never would happen. If all females in the game have 4+ babies, then i think that's exactly when we would like to have more Eves being born no? And it's not a hard limit, because mom can increase that limit if that family wants even more population (by eating cravings), but at least it gives the mom a chance to choose if her family is already big enough for her to support or not.

I still believe the Pros would outweigh the Cons, and hey, we could experiment it and if doesn't work, then just reverse it again right?
As i stated, i believe this would mostly just affect high-population times and not hinder low-population times.

Baby Cooldowns are just a variable after all it's not like it's a huge change hard to reverse. (0s, 30s, 1min, 2min)
Baby limit suggested would be 4 babies max + number of cravings eaten by mother, this number could easily be adjusted up or down.
SID skeleton cooldown can easily be changed from 2min to 10sec, for all intents and purposes that baby was never born anyway.

Coding required:
Adjust algorithm to guarantee a female birth if mom is the only fertile in that family.
Having a variable (baby limit = 4) per mom and not a hard limit for everyone, each craving eaten increases that variable.
Prevent /SID babies from being born in the same family they already decided they don't want to be born in anyway.

Maybe it's too much to ask, but would love Jason to give some feedback on this topic in case i'm missing something here.
Thanks to everyone for reading and providing your civil comments.

Marquis · 2023-10-21 00:23:32

Here’s a github update that might vindicate you, Strilar.

Whoops! A forced birth cooldown of 0 seconds got pushed back in July 2023...

Strilar · 2023-10-22 14:50:58

Oh yeah! Finally!
What's the new cooldown now? I don't look at git stuff
1min would be cool and since 1min =1 year it would nicely represent the 9 months pregnancy cycle.

I'm also happy to see that the "escape horse" have been increased (from 7sec to 11 sec) although i still think it may be too low. I always try to use horseless carts instead because this feature gets really annoying (i'm ok with escaping horses existing if neglected but we should be able to dismount, cut a few trees and load them with logs before we have to chase them every single time)

Marquis · 2023-10-22 18:37:57

I casually read the code. I think we can take the comment at face value; Average cooldown is two minutes. And max is 5 min.

Not that I know what all this means, but here’s the mathematical distribution used. Kumaraswamy distribution. From what I gather is it’s like a bell curve except the tails aren’t thin (better chance of tail events).

Jason wrote:

static double pickBirthCooldownSeconds() {
// Kumaraswamy distribution
// PDF:
// k(x,a,b) = a * b * x**( a - 1 ) * (1-x**a)**(b-1)
// CDF:
// kCDF(x,a,b) = 1 - (1-x**a)**b
// Invers CDF:
// kCDFInv(y,a,b) = ( 1 - (1-y)**(1.0/b) )**(1.0/a)
// For b=1, PDF curve starts at 0 and curves upward, for all a > 2
// good values seem to be a=1.5, b=1
// actually, make it more bell-curve like, with a=2, b=3
double a = 2;
double b = 3;

// mean is around 2 minutes

// uniform
double u = randSource.getRandomDouble();

// feed into inverted CDF to sample a value from the distribution
double v = pow( 1 - pow( 1-u, (1/b) ), 1/a );

// v is in [0..1], the value range of Kumaraswamy
// put max at 5 minutes
return v * 5 * 60;
}

Strilar · 2023-10-26 00:27:21

Hello! Just came to say that baby cooldown doesn't seem to be fixed, i had like six or seven kids in this life some of them "in a row" in a period less than one minute, one baby is born, i pick it up to name it, and before i have time to type "you are..." another one shows up, i love having kids and it's nice to have a big family, but again, it's overwhelming when you have so many and specially if you don't have a minute to breathe between each one.

Once again i keep asking for a better baby cooldown and maybe a baby limit (that you CAN increase by eating cravings for example if you want more babies).

Also tried the horse carts, they keep escaping and being extremely annoying, every time i go to get cut trees to grab logs or dig and cut stones for walls, the horse runs away and i spend more time chasing it than doing any productive work.

example:
Dismount horse
Grab shovel from cart
Use shovel on big rock to dig it up
Place shovel back in cart
Grab chisel
Use chisel in stone
Use mallet to cut it in half
Drop mallet
Grab chisel from cut stone
Place chisel in stone again
Hit it with mallet to make stones for walls
... horse fled already before I got a SINGLE stone into the cart, i need to keep mounting/dismounting the horse every 3 or 4 steps just to make sure this doesn't keep happening. Same thing with getting logs, after chopping a tree, you still need to remove the 2 wood to reach the log, i can't even put two logs on the cart without it running away.

Horses should run away if neglected and forgotten for a long time, but 11 seconds is still way too short, it takes a lot of steps and work to get a horsecart, so let's us use it without it being a major annoyance please, i believe that even if the "timer" was 1 or 2 minutes it would probably be too short, but at least we could work with it.
Either that or give us some alternative, like using a lasso to bind a horse to any nearby tree, we can't bring "roped fences" with us to prevent them from escaping while we're working...

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2023-07-18 17:27:55

Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#2 2023-07-19 03:52:13

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#3 2023-07-19 09:08:12

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#4 2023-07-19 11:13:32

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#5 2023-07-19 12:56:54

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#6 2023-07-19 13:04:07

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#7 2023-07-19 13:34:16

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#8 2023-07-19 19:00:10

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#9 2023-07-19 20:52:24

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#10 2023-07-19 21:06:00

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#11 2023-07-19 23:08:40

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#12 2023-07-20 14:15:15

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#13 2023-07-22 13:55:17

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#14 2023-07-22 14:36:09

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#15 2023-07-26 17:49:33

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#16 2023-07-27 00:56:48

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#17 2023-07-27 16:33:06

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#18 2023-07-27 16:42:38

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#19 2023-07-27 17:49:47

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#20 2023-07-29 06:52:49

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#21 2023-07-29 09:39:10

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#22 2023-10-21 00:23:32

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#23 2023-10-22 14:50:58

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#24 2023-10-22 18:37:57

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

#25 2023-10-26 00:27:21

Re: Baby cooldown/limit please? Baby boom to much for both veteran and new

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