Four classifications of settlements

bENdI · 2018-11-28 22:25:40

I just concieved of this for fun:

There are four types of settlements: Isolated Village, False Civilization, Diverse Village, True Civilization

Isolated Village - a SINGLE village with a SINGLE lineage. This is most found in early-game or in the game currently (November 2018).

False Civilization - MULTIPLE CONNECTED villages with a SINGLE lineage. This is found when females make camps outside of town or an eve repopulates an abandoned area with surrounding municipalities.

Diverse Village - a SINGLE village with MULTIPLE (≥2) lineages. This can be found if twinning/tripping/quadding eves manage to stay alive, establish a town, and have each of their lineages not die out or kill eachother. It can also be found if a bell tower is built and eves follow it but don't build outside of town.

True Civilization - MULTIPLE CONNECTED villages with MULTIPLE (≥2) lineages. This is very very rare, especially now (November 2018). An example of this was Casinotown and surrounding municipalities when there was a constant traffic of eve migration towards the town. It's basically a village connected to other villages with multiple lineages living amongst them.

I personally enjoy True Civilizations because you get to be reborn in it more often, however there is a risk for griefers as if they aren't dealt with with curses, they can come back and kill everyone again like with Napoleon. Also, True Civilizations are magnets for lag due to people gathering around a "Hub" and leaving their trash everywhere.

I hate False Civilizations because most of the time, it's because of some eve who decided "lmao i wanna be the only line here and risk losing the settlement due to low population"

Sirryan · 2018-11-28 22:53:23

I mean Eves in "false civs" can't really just pop out a new Eve I'm pretty sure, and if they did, I don't image they would get rid of them.

Jadelink · 2018-11-29 01:48:24

As someone who constantly attempts to manafacture 'false civs' (by building sub bases) I would welcome a new eve into one of my expansions very warmly. In fact, if the main base doesn't know they are there for a generation or so, that might be even better.

Morti · 2018-11-29 02:30:21

If you want these civilizations, you need two things; roads, and horses.

Technically the horses aren't necessary, but they will greatly, greatly, ease the process of making roads.

We need good road makers, and we need wranglers and corral builders to provide our civs with an abundance of fast, heavy, transportation.

If you want to be a good road maker, don't waste the flat stones on bends, don't make a bunch steps or loops around town; make straight roads out of an intersection near the center of your town. The only steps you should be making are one steps, to get the road around a cactus, berry bush (yes, step around berry bushes, do not remove them, trust me), rabbit hole, snow bank, unremovable tree (which should not exist) or any other permanent obstruction, like an ice hole or a hot spring.

Nothing should be unremovable in this game, except maybe a hot spring, since it's more of a deep underground feature that only appears on the surface and is a continuous release of pressure from what lies deep beneath the ground.

Don't step your road for a tree, don't step it for a 'big hard rock' and don't step it just because you want it to go to that one water hole five meters off the road. You make T junctions for those later. The important thing is to get the road going out of town so that gatherers and lost children can find it as soon as possible, to get in, and out, saving as much time as we can afford them.

When you have horses with carts, or maybe carts with rubber wheels, I'd suggest extensive scouting in the four cardinal and four intermediate directions; N, S, E, W, NE, NW, SE, SW, or, if you are the type of gatherer who is willing to run five biomes out to find another grassland for milkweed, and happen upon a location with the conditions for a settlement (soil, clay, water, natural warmth, etc.) then when you get back home, you work on a road in that general direction, sticking to the most direct cardinal direction, until you reach the point where the road to the new location will be perpendicular to your main road, and goes off in the next cardinal direction.

In the long run, sticking to these types of road networks will make it easy for gatherers to mentally divide the surroundings of any towns into quadrants and their job of gathering resources will be that much easier.

Don't make grids of fast, flat stone roads, in town.

Try not to step a road network through your town.

As the first road maker, it is important that you do your job correctly so that the flow of goods in and out of town happens quickly and efficiently.

Stop whining about roads to nowhere when you are taking your babies on tours. You clearly do not understand the point of roads given the situation we are presented with in this game. We are to spread out, to collect resources from our surroundings, and to return them to the nucleus of civilization. There is a point when the time spent going out to gather resources and bring them back to our origin, makes the travel time more valuable than the goods we are returning. At that point it is worth considering settling in a new home, closer to the resources found in that direction. That is how the greatest of networked towns, the greatest civilizations, have been formed.

--

As for horse wranglers and horse corrals, we have yet to see the great civilizations for the future given our current tech and abilities. The horse and cart is our ticket to that future.

No wait, scratch that analogy. The ticket, is the milkweed farm.

I want to see fields of milkweed as large, and as permanent, as our current fields of goose berries.

Eight milkweed it takes to make a lasso. That's sixteen soil tilling piles of two. A basket or backpack holds three piles. That's three trips to the soil patch with two to spare, with both. If you are using a cart with four baskets, that's two trips of twelve. Include your backpack and one trip yields fifteen, just one shy of the soil necessary. Make it two trips of fifteen, and you're doing your part as a good citizen, in the war against hunger.

The alternative to hauling soil to the water, is hauling the water, to the soil.

When the patches of soil in your neighboring home grassland, are running low, leave them for those who have yet to know the thrill of the wind, rushing into their lungs, on the back of a steed. If the journey is far enough, you may instead opt for setting a hit in a nearby grassland, and working the land there for the sole purpose of farming milkweed, with the blacksmith's cooperation. Bonus if that smith is also you. But do not take the iron and steel already available in your town. That would defeat the purpose, of this whole endeavor. Instead, bring a fresh cart of surface iron, or at the very least, a basket's worth that you find while you are out scouting the lands. Use that iron to make yourself your own shovel and hoe or two. Use the shovel to dig up empty soil pits for the second round, and trust me, if you do it right that life, one hoe will not be enough.

Bring a bowl and split the piles of three into piles of two. Don't waste 1/3 of the resources for a few minutes of one life's time.

Leave spaces in the fields of tilled soil for buckets later. For every patch of soil, you get 10x2 loads of 3 soil. 10 baskets becomes 15 patches, that's 30 patches of tilled soil. A bonus 3 worms and 1 clay, if you really care about the future. Leave the worms and the clay in the fields for someone to gather later and that is 35 spaces. One right in the middle for your bucket, if just one. 3 full buckets of water will take care of your entire field.

That's 30 milkweed.

15 thread; 7 ropes, 3 lassos.

You've done your part citizen.

Get those lassos home to the children, and enjoy your last meal with your family.

Ellesanna · 2018-11-29 02:51:43

I love diverse villages. I'm afraid I don't really understand why it makes a world of difference if multiple villages are connected to each other instead of one megacity... I suppose it lessens the likelihood of everyone dying at once but thats the only advantage I can think of.

CrazyEddie · 2018-11-29 02:57:38

When soil is coming from distant lands instead of compost heaps, wouldn't it be better to spend the iron and save the soil by tilling twice? One trip to find iron buys a lot of tilling; one trip to find soil buys a mere row and a half, or three if you spend the extra till.

Morti · 2018-11-29 03:17:29

Ellesanna wrote:

I love diverse villages. I'm afraid I don't really understand why it makes a world of difference if multiple villages are connected to each other instead of one megacity... I suppose it lessens the likelihood of everyone dying at once but thats the only advantage I can think of.

It has to do with the limited resources available in the area. Iron and water are the big ones, but also natural, renewable food sources, the ground upon which our towns are built which reduce food consumption rates, and natural soil deposits which are just easier to draw from than producing compost, so people are drawn to them more often.

Setting up a sheep pen and making compost increases the rate that water is consumed, drastically, as those sheep become consumers of 6 goosberries + 1 carrot. More if they are regularly being used to produce wool instead of just dung, mutton and a single sheepskin or fleece.

The battles every town faces are; keeping people fed, keeping people working and keeping people happy with their lives.

A good town layout goes a long way towards all these things, but when people stay, eat, and work for a life, they contribute to the exhaustion of resources. There is no way to escape that in this game.

Luckily in real life, the vast majority of mass is recycled on the surface of this planet. But incorporating that feature of reality into games is something programmers haven't quite got the knack for yet. We just don't have the computing power available to every home gamer, nor do programmers have the ambition, to make the sort of simulations that NASA, NOAA or any other global resource or event tracking services pays the big bucks for. And if they do have that talent or ambition, they are working for such organizations, raking in a lot of dough and prestige for their service to humanity.

I'm sorry, bit of a tangent.

It's all about density and distribution.

Morti · 2018-11-29 04:14:48

CrazyEddie wrote:

When soil is coming from distant lands instead of compost heaps, wouldn't it be better to spend the iron and save the soil by tilling twice? One trip to find iron buys a lot of tilling; one trip to find soil buys a mere row and a half, or three if you spend the extra till.

Iron is too rare atm to exhaust that rapidly for the sake of soil.

However, if we can achieve the state of civilization where the number of tamed horses exceeds the number of players in an area, maybe we'll reach a state where soil or water are more valuable than iron...

No, I don't see that happening.

We may have periodic moments where new veins are tapped an iron abundance seems to dwarf soil abundance, but that state is unsustainable. Whereas wells refill, and soil can be made from compost.

Maybe when we have bulldozers, dump trucks and can make our own grand canyons, that'll change.

This planet is composed of far more iron, than all the other elements necessary for life, in their respective quantities.

However, the crust is another matter.

And life, a unique matter, on top of that, of which we are good examples of overall composition.

Iron and silicon are the skin, bones and, most of the organs, of the future.

I'd like to imagine that we will be the brains and the hearts, but we may just find ourselves, all organic life included, microscopic organisms along for the ride, as the machine behemoths consume the planets, stars, and everything else we can get in our maw before the expansion of the universe casts it beyond our grasp and we're left to work with all we could gather, as we slowly succumb to heat death.

In that final situation, life like us, will be as significant to the great machine, as a molecule of a neurotransmitter, is to us.

If we make it that far.

CrazyEddie · 2018-11-29 04:35:28

Ellesanna wrote:

I'm afraid I don't really understand why it makes a world of difference if multiple villages are connected to each other instead of one megacity...

To put it somewhat less tangentially than Morti's otherwise excellent explanation:

There's three things to balance in any settlement: consumption, extraction, and renewal. Consumption is food and is determined by the number of people you have and how well they keep their temperature regulated (plus things like not overeating, not overfeeding, not getting fever, etc). Extraction removes resources from nature and converts it into food - some of it is already food (berries, burdock, bananas) and some of it has to be processed to create food (soil, water, and iron). Renewal replenishes nature's supply of resources.

In the short run, your rate of consumption can't exceed your rate of extraction. In the long run, your rate of consumption can't exceed the rate of renewal. (I say "your rate of extraction" and "the rate of renewal" because you (the townspeople) determine how quickly you can extract, but nature determines how quickly nature will renew.) This means the maximum population of a town now is limited by how quickly you can extract resources. But the population of a town later is limited by how quickly those resources get renewed once they've run out. Both of these are difficult constraints to deal with, although the second is much harder than the first.

There's a limit to the amount of resources you can extract and a limit to how quickly you can extract them, and the physical size of your settlement affects them both. You can find more resources by sending your gatherers further and further away from the town center, but doing so dramatically slows the rate at which they can be gathered. Road building is a way to get the increased-extraction-limit of gathering across a wider area while mitigating the reduced-extraction-rate that doing so would otherwise entail. In other words: "roads to nowhere" increase the number of people that can survive in a town in the short run.

In the long run, you're faced with the renewal limit. You extract close to town and are limited by your extraction rate. Then it runs out close to town and you're limited by the renewal rate close to town. So then you extract further away and are limited by the reduced extraction rate from extracting far away. Then you build roads, and improve your far-away extraction rate. Then you run out far away, and are limited by the renewal rate of your larger gathering area. So at some point, you reach a maximum number of people that can survive in your town, and in the long run that number will be much smaller than it is while you are still expanding, building roads, and exhausting the resources in a wider and wider area.

The only way to have more people is for them to be so much further away that they're not drawing upon the same resources.

Which leads to another conclusion: the closer together your towns are, the less population each one must have. And conversely, the less populated your towns are, the more easily they can sustain themselves within a smaller area, even after the resources are exhausted and you're living within the limits of renewal rather than extraction. In other words, you can sustain more people by spreading them out in small clumps than by putting them all in one spot.

That's why we need roads.

CrazyEddie · 2018-11-29 05:11:11

Iron is too rare atm to exhaust that rapidly for the sake of soil.

I'm not sure that's true if you measure them by their inputs and outputs. Consider the man-minutes needed to find and return with a load of iron vs. the same for a load of soil. Now consider how much is produced by a load of iron vs. a load of soil.

Let's handwave and say that an expedition to fetch iron takes five times as long as an expedition to find soil. Let's assume we're in the basket era, and that the iron-fetcher needs a slot for a sharp stone so he can forage and survive on his way back. Say the ironman spends ten minutes and brings back two iron, and let's add in another two minutes for the smith to turn them into hoes. In that same time, the soilman brings back six baskets of soil, or eighteen bowls.

So for the same labor input (i.e. the same food cost), the iron can make one hundred tilled rows, or fifty if double-tilled, while the soil can make nine tilled rows, or eighteen if double-tilled. To make one hundred tilled rows, with single-tilling you need one iron trip (twelve man-minutes) plus sixty-six soil trips (132 man-minutes), whereas with double-tilling you need two iron trips (24 man-minutes) plus thirty-three soil trips (66 man-minutes). In this handwavy scenario double-tilling wins; it produces the same output at a lower cost: 90 man-minutes vs. 144.

Soil has to be very much closer and easier to find than iron for things to tip in the favor of single-tilling.

---

Anecdotally, lately I've rarely seen a shortage of iron in a village. Either there's no steel tools at all because nobody knows how to smith and nobody has bothered to get iron, or there's plenty of steel tools available, including hoes (and knives! always plenty of knives). Whereas I've frequently seen shortages of soil (and the accompanying famines) if composting hasn't gotten started, and that's definitely with people going out in search of it.

lionon · 2018-11-29 05:35:33

Since the Eve spiral recently got smaller maybe there is more chance to see more than isolated villages

Baker · 2018-11-29 06:04:49

I prefer to classify them based on size and tech level.

Vexenie · 2018-11-29 06:31:39

The settlement classes are like poker hands:
The top is the weakest and bottom, strongest

lionon · 2018-11-29 06:36:40

Baker wrote:

I prefer to classify them based on size and tech level.

The amount of lineages in a city/network determines the amount of players it gets, so it's a major factor. Especially since you have a fair chance to be reborn into a city despite (temporary) lineage-ban

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#1 2018-11-28 22:25:40

Four classifications of settlements

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Re: Four classifications of settlements

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