A solution to overcrowded villages.

JoshuaN · 2019-02-20 01:34:02

Simply put we need leaders to keep people coordinated. You don't need to control them, just guide them. Watch over the village and let people know when there is a problem, or rather a lack of vital tools or resources.

If the fertile women in the village are left to have every child then the village WILL starve. This is why places like china (one of the most overpopulated places in the world) lets you only keep your first two children by LAW. We also need to make sure that we have a competent player handling sheep and the newer players making compost rather than just eating berries. In the mean time for starter villages we need our vets managing the higher technology such as making newcomen pumps and cisterns.

When your village has sufficient compost start making milkweed for ropes! These are needed for buckets, handcarts, and a ton of other tools!

You can't possibly coordinate 50 people in one village. This also reduces the life of your steel tools. Eventually something is going to run out and there isn't going to be much time to react to it. If you run out of kindling, ropes, and axes/hatchets all at the same time you're going to have an awfully bad time trying to cook pies and blacksmith. Make sure people know what the village needs and find someone who knows how to do it.

Don't keep each and every baby. Keep girl count reasonable. Too low and the generation may die. Too many and overpopulation is exponential.
Keeping sons isn't so dangerous because they don't produce more kids, this is a double edged sword. They are less of a risk of overpopulation but they also risk under population if the pop is all male. They also eat food like all babies do and food costs iron, stones, or skewers as the cost of hoes.
A likely strategy is to send your boys out into the wild to gather iron and other materials and keep an eye on the girls inside town. Yet again i cannot stress this enough. Do not keep every child.

Keep small villages under a population of 10-15. Its not a magical number, its just a good one. If you do find a magical number report it to your nearest ministry of wizardry. Long distance gatherers equipped with backpacks can survive off wild food and pies so make sure you inform them of what the town needs before they head out. Iron is one of the big ones.

Last edited by JoshuaN (2019-02-20 02:55:43)

Sanshuba · 2019-02-20 01:57:14

You will literally starve haha.
After this new update, more houses started to be built to keep people warm. Yesterday, I was in a village where the mothers just dropped children on the house and some babysitters was feeding them, there was a bakery inse the house with a lot of pies, this update reduced children death in big cities, because instead of starving your kid to continue the work, the mothers just put the children in a house.
So... the kids were getting older and started to eat berries, after some minutes the berries ran out and the children came back to the house to eat pies, a grabbed one pie and put index my bag because I knew what was happening. The pies run out as well, all the food run out without time enough for farm regrowing, a lot of people starving, running to all directions devouring all the near wild berries going far and faraway until only left me and one girl cousin, the others died, get lost or was surviving on the wild until the food regrowing.

A leader would makes things better, but it is difficult to implement. And if you kill children, some of them reborn and griefe the village.

That mass starving will happen quite often because of the new update. If you are warm, well fed and on a high yum bonus, your chances of having a baby increases. So the chance of that babysitters on the fire is much higher than the chance of a woman from a small village.

DestinyCall · 2019-02-20 02:18:48

There is a clear solution. Kill all the girls. Over-population problem will be fixed in a single generation. Guaranteed!

But seriously, the baby fire needs to double as a school to educate new players or you are going to get screwed. All those mouths are attached to hands. Make sure your kids are out there working and helping bring in needed resources instead of keeping them all on the "safe" jobs around the berry patch. Give new players something to do beyond berries so they can contribute in better ways.

Let them know the village is in trouble and send them out to gather needed resources.

JoshuaN · 2019-02-20 02:32:04

DestinyCall wrote:

There is a clear solution. Kill all the girls. Over-population problem will be fixed in a single generation. Guaranteed!

Lol we call that griefing. x3

Tarr · 2019-02-20 02:44:31

I think Jason just needs to bring back the lineage ban on death. As someone who constantly evades the lineage ban anyways this solves quite a few problems.

-Groups can't just keep returning to towns over and over again. Unless you have a lot of friends or a lot of accounts if you got lineage banned to a place after dying this would mean people have to think twice before just shift + deleting every single city. If you abuse your instant death button constantly you'll just be stuck as Eve and if that's what you wanted you have a clear and easy way to get there. Every life should be valued and not a kill yourself simulator until you land in the correct city repeatedly.

Unfortunately this would hurt new players as they constantly die and have to respawn either back to your town or another town on the server. However, this brings importance on making sure your kids are well taken care of as each baby is precious as you know they won't be returning if they die. To make up for this fact lower the lineage ban from 90 minutes to one hour flat so living one good life would open up all the cities you were currently banned to.

-It limits how many children can enter a city at once. Overpopulation is terrible at the moment as we have no actual means to stopping a flood of children from being born. What is currently occurring is a boom/bust system where you keeping 5 girls explodes into 20 and next thing you know your city has a population of 40+. What occurs next is massive famine which leads to most of the towns population dying and everyone who dies gets passed to one of the other successful towns where the process repeats itself. Murdering your children is both frowned upon and is fun for neither party involved. Our only current solution to killing children would be a pet boar in the nursery for mothers to drop the baby on which is just cruel.

When the servers were split we had about 2-3 villages per server with a few Eve camps sprinkled in for good measure. This meant town populations hovered around 10-20 people max which is a much more sustainable number than 30-40 especially since Jason basically doubled the base amount of food needed per person with moving people to the green. Basically where as before when we lived in the desert we were eating half as much food with half as many people and now we've doubled the population while doubling the amount of food needed.

-No more revenge murder. I would assume this is less likely than the other situation but being unable to return after someone failed to raise you means you cannot just be born to another mother in town and return to kill your lazy mother.

As someone who absolutely despises the lineage ban as a mechanic I think it's better to have some sort of way to slow the amount of people entering a town per hour than keep the game in the current ever stressful state of when will all the babies come and eat every bit of food before dying.

Go! Bwah! · 2019-02-20 02:45:22

Sanshuba wrote:

A leader would makes things better, but it is difficult to implement.

You could implement blessing and have each bless bestow a glow upon the blessed (it would stack to make bigger auras). Not perfect but it would get a good way there.

Tarr · 2019-02-20 02:46:45

Go! Bwah! wrote:

Sanshuba wrote:
A leader would makes things better, but it is difficult to implement.
You could implement blessing and have each bless bestow a glow upon the blessed (it would stack to make bigger auras). Not perfect but it would get a good way there.

No good boy points until Jason gives us chickens and chicken tendies.

antking:]# · 2019-02-20 02:46:51

Go! Bwah! wrote:

Sanshuba wrote:
A leader would makes things better, but it is difficult to implement.
You could implement blessing and have each bless bestow a glow upon the blessed (it would stack to make bigger auras). Not perfect but it would get a good way there.

soo... you want people to grow halos?

Go! Bwah! · 2019-02-20 02:50:02

antking:]# wrote:

Go! Bwah! wrote:
Sanshuba wrote:
A leader would makes things better, but it is difficult to implement.
You could implement blessing and have each bless bestow a glow upon the blessed (it would stack to make bigger auras). Not perfect but it would get a good way there.
soo... you want people to grow halos?

Sure, why not? Give a little positive reinforcement rather than just the negative reinforcement of Donkey Town.

JoshuaN · 2019-02-20 03:16:26

I don't think a blessing system is necessary. I think simply making eve towns a little more survivable would cut down on the unfathomable amount of overpopulated towns because there would be more of them. Less people in one spot is better for everyone. I personally suck at eve runs and i can imagine new players are utterly helpless in these situations. So there's not a lot of good towns popping up everywhere. Deserts used to be a haven that magically reduced the food requirements of the village so there were a lot of really goods spots that are now really bad. "Perfect spots" are harder to come by now.

Last edited by JoshuaN (2019-02-20 03:16:54)

Anandamide · 2019-02-20 03:32:26

If anything, its easier to find a spot now. Before you needed to be on the intersection of a swamp, desert and green area for an area to be considered viable. A perfect spot had that and then a pocket of prairie and jungle close by. Its good to have iron close but its not a problem if its one or two biomes away. Now a viable spot only needs green and swamp. A good spot is intersected with a prairie, and an even better one intersects with a large badlands.

Go! Bwah! · 2019-02-20 03:34:21

JoshuaN wrote:

I don't think a blessing system is necessary.

Jason agrees with you so far, so it's a moot point anyway. I just think it would be neat.

Greep · 2019-02-20 03:52:07

Anandamide wrote:

If anything, its easier to find a spot now. Before you needed to be on the intersection of a swamp, desert and green area for an area to be considered viable. A perfect spot had that and then a pocket of prairie and jungle close by. Its good to have iron close but its not a problem if its one or two biomes away. Now a viable spot only needs green and swamp. A good spot is intersected with a prairie, and an even better one intersects with a large badlands.

TBF, you could also have settled on a grass/swamp before the update, and be better off even then (neutral was hotter). So it's only easy to find a spot cause they all suck.

Edit: Although, I don't think this is actually the case anyways. Previously, minimum # ponds was somehwere in the 2-4 range, minimum # branching trees at 20. You find a swamp/grassland, you settle. Now it's more like in the 5-15 range, and 40-100 branching trees.

Last edited by Greep (2019-02-20 03:54:19)

Bob 101 · 2019-02-20 06:07:27

Keep fewer kids but provide much more for them. Make sure they get clothes and a job to do.

I find that having many more boys then girls works out quite well. Boys will not overpopulate and are also good for "dangerous" jobs like hunting rabbits.
Had like 2 daughters, Rest was sons assigned to importent jobs.

Girls can't be relied on to do jobs. But each girl will have alot of kids, People are mistaken when they say having lots of girls is good for towns.

Last edited by Bob 101 (2019-02-20 06:16:22)

DestinyCall · 2019-02-20 06:42:20

The problem with killing the "extra" babies during a population boom is that each one of those babies is a player currently on the server trying to get reborn. So if your village is on the brink of starvation (like the majority of villages have been since the update) and you decide to start intentionally killing off infants to reduce the village's population ... those babies don't just magically disappear.

Unless the player decides to log off, they are reborn somewhere else, into another struggling village that might also be on the brink of starvation. If the new village is unable to sustain the increased baby load and some of the babies starve then they go back into rebirth roulette and your village experiences increased birth rate as a result of the other villages failing to keep your dead babies alive somewhere else. We are playing in a closed system .. if Eve camps are death traps and early villages are death traps and established towns are death traps, then the cycle of death and rebirth is accelerated and the number of babies each surviving mother must foster goes up, even though the total number of individual players remains the same. This also feeds into the boom/bust cycle that happens in many villages as birth rates go up in tandem with rising death rates, then stabilize when the population has spread out enough to handle the load for a little while. When another large village on the server collapses, resulting in a large number of player deaths happening in a short period of time ... those players get redistributed across the server, increasing the birthrate in other villages as a result ... and potentially leading to additional crashes ... and an even higher birthrate in any surviving villages.

I don't have a good solution to this problem, but I really don't think killing the babies is going to help that much. If anything, it feeds into the cycle. You just push the burden onto a different village or eve camp or perhaps even to a different mother in your own village, if the child is not lineage banned yet. Eventually, the increased burden will cause one of those other villages to crash and you'll be hit with a new influx of the unquiet dead, seeking warmth and rebirth.

Because the dead aren't really dead in this game. They are just somewhere else now, trying to stay warm.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-02-20 06:44:30)

JoshuaN · 2019-02-20 08:01:45

I am much think, such confuse, very bamboozle, woof.

You've mentioned something that has piqued my interest, destiny. The cycle of death. To me its a bit like a growing swarm of locusts that eat everything in their path. As one group of players starve out in one village they spawn into another village. The chain of famine continues endlessly. Perhaps its a sign that the game needs more balancing.

Here is a short documentary about locusts: https://youtu.be/6bx5JUGVahk Its strange how similar babies are to locusts.

Last edited by JoshuaN (2019-02-20 08:02:16)

stew · 2019-02-20 09:20:58

The solution to overpopulation is to build more functioning villages, so the load of players can be distributed to all this villages

DestinyCall · 2019-02-20 09:37:49

stew wrote:

The solution to overpopulation is to build more functioning villages, so the load of players can be distributed to all this villages

Yes, I think this is the ideal solution. If dying players have somewhere to go where they won't die for a while, it helps keep the birth rate lower and more stable in struggling villages.

Also, things get thrown out of balance if there are not enough strong towns to absorb new and inexperienced players. These players tend to die very quickly and get reborn frequently without a strong support system. And since they generally lack the knowledge and experience to contribute adequately to a village on the brink of famine or the ability to forage when food runs out in the village center, they are usually the first to die when a village starts to collapse. But just because the new players die early and fast, that doesn't mean they won't get reborn back into the same collapsing village again. If anything, the odds are greater, since they die so easily and so often.

In a town with plentiful clothing and properly constructed buildings, new players can survive long enough to learn and expand their skills, which allows them to be reborn into their next village with a greater survival chance and more understanding of the game. This usually translates to a better overall survival chance for the village, as well, since they are able to contribute more and better. Although it usually takes many lives and many deaths to master this game's intricacies.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-02-20 10:23:41)

voy178 · 2019-02-20 10:14:47

There aren't a lot of jobs beginners can adequately do without being in the way or starve themselves on the way back from the wild. Maybe the solution is regenerating wilderness with more food for those tricky situations?

And we need to agree on a good way to raise new players into the system and teach them what they need to know. Maybe the meta should be to keep new players by the fires until they can't be breastfed anymore and then send them to do some task like gathering firewood or putting berries into a few selective bowls depending on the number of bowls in the city, gathering more clay for more bowls and plates, looking for eggs, getting iron.

Being by the fire gives more time for teaching too.

pein · 2019-02-20 10:23:13

i was in hero village
some people were bored so kill each other
i grabbed 3/5 knives, then the fourth later

then a chick just smashed some copper i made
she had a knife
no one else, later all sheep got killed and 2 babies
i catch her running away

3 rooms got locked same time and some people were stuck, all noobs ran around aimlessly when i told i need a fire and ropes
then i found the pick and let them out put too messy to make new keys and open the doors

they raised kids anyway, even if we had all berries gone
the two times i made pie we had too many babies then they competed for food all the time

if you don't work nothing gets done
if you are alone managing people, they take it as an insult
if you kill them they curse you even if you are right

the best thing i done was to make compost on the outpost, a bit further NÉ and who found it was alive, who not, well, not a big deal for them

main village doesn't need other than hoes and compost, and basic stuff
all technology, weapons should be on an outpost planned out properly
the only time you should have kids in outposts when the main town is fucked

you can fix it when everyone dead, rather than with noobs running left and right
make the outpost and split the load or keep advanced stuff out of sight, its just worth it because of timers, when one has to wait, other can work
needs a bit of skill so not everyone gets to outpost, but who takes it seriously, and comes back, has an advantage
who is just messing around , let it mess around
give them some compost to farm and maybe pie ingredients
making a new kiln and havign iro nthere is faster than doing it between babies

Falsewall · 2019-02-20 15:57:28

I sat in the middle of a village with a baby mouflon in hand. Told my 8 dependents to make me a Berry carrot bowl.

It took 10 minutes of asking these Berry munching shits to grab the carrots I grew & picked and shove it into a Berry bowl with our newly grown Berrys.

Town criers cry your heart's out.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-02-20 01:34:02

A solution to overcrowded villages.

#2 2019-02-20 01:57:14

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#3 2019-02-20 02:18:48

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#4 2019-02-20 02:32:04

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#5 2019-02-20 02:44:31

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#6 2019-02-20 02:45:22

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#7 2019-02-20 02:46:45

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#8 2019-02-20 02:46:51

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#9 2019-02-20 02:50:02

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#10 2019-02-20 03:16:26

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#11 2019-02-20 03:32:26

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#12 2019-02-20 03:34:21

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#13 2019-02-20 03:52:07

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#14 2019-02-20 06:07:27

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#15 2019-02-20 06:42:20

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#16 2019-02-20 08:01:45

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#17 2019-02-20 09:20:58

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#18 2019-02-20 09:37:49

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#19 2019-02-20 10:14:47

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#20 2019-02-20 10:23:13

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

#21 2019-02-20 15:57:28

Re: A solution to overcrowded villages.

Board footer