Ideas for resource contention

1%Spacebar · 2019-04-23 06:51:27

Booklat1 wrote:

Thaulos wrote:
Resources can be made to be infinite long term but finite on the short term. You can have mines regenerate iron over time just like wells regenerate water.
but they should be finite long term, thats the whole point
if it regens we have no reason to migrate

But if it regenerates slow enough, it'll still mean you have to migrate, but it will be back again by the time an eve or other migrating family stumbles across it.

Edit: wow, i probably should have refreshed the page before posting

Last edited by 1%Spacebar (2019-04-23 06:52:28)

Amon · 2019-04-23 07:53:43

Go with the finite map, go! I think it will be an interesting change worth trying out in the current playing field. Might be interesting if it were even limited by a sea? I don't like the shrinking idea though, would be all sorts of messed up as it swallows up towns and the space gets so small it can't support the whole playerbase if it get's so far.

On a single or only a few eves. New surnames should be able to be created, say by rewarding marriage behaviour, then the spouses can can say, "we are the masons" and if the surnames match, now they begun a new bloodline, and relation should be changes distantly related for all but imediate family (sister in law, mother, grandmother, uncle, niece, cousins etc). Like imo it would be stupid to have a map filled with XY's which are so far removed you effectively are not related in the real world.
A way to change links from XYZ to Adopted son/ Adoptive mother grandmother.
i really hate it when im adoptive and my grandchildren go fawn at my biological mother when she matters nothing to me! And them getting lost in al the X Y Z dustant relatives to find the actusl mum. heh.

on Social organising, A megaphone would be great! Have your voice heared from further away, relay information faster as long as you are holding it.

On limited resources, mines could use higher tech upgrades, Perhaps quarries should become necessary as well at some point.

On tool retention and taking, we could definitely use an unbreaking mortar and pestle to replace round and sharp stones or a millstone, same for other work stations. A while ago I suggested to be able to tie coloured ribbons around tools to better identify them, that way it would be easier to identify tool theft or keep track of your borrowed tools. Same for glazing bowls or creating porcelain, even if for bowl's its just a small rim on top of a different colour.

Back to the one eve. Travel currently is cumbersome, in the sense that it only allows for one person at a time and if you're a woman on a horse there will be a mess. If carts could get removable seat upgrades, and if more passangers could sit in cars. (including a nursing woman) population spreading will be easier
to go further out to create new towns in clean areas rather than making them in drained areas as satellite towns to larger towns.

People are also currently longing for better storage.

Well, I think one reason why towns die is lack of organisation. Megaphones are cool for that, but what about architecting? What if you could leave blueprints behind for future architects or if you could just mark floor boundaries with something easy and cheap.
If the map will be finite, we better damn get tools to assure that towns are built better.

Is there anything else I can think of? Hmm not really.
Oh yeah. Trains? I mean we have minecarts, what if we could interconnect towns with train lines with wagons for people and wagons for goods. Also women are infertile while traveling or if emptyhanded give birth to a baby holding it. (honestly imagine the chaos of babies born flung out of trains...as if it's not horrific enough to give birth and drop them down while driving a car or horse...)

JonySky · 2019-04-23 08:00:20

Jason, Create rivers and seas,
Create large boats and smaller boats for the exploration and transport of people or animals
also creates bridges for rivers
Separate resources so they are not so abundant
Rivers and seas are natural separators of zones

That each EVE appear in these natural areas

Copper should have a similar use to iron in this way it will be more valuable

The best example to get what you say in your post, is to follow the steps of current humanity
the history of our Civilization is an open book to get new stories

Last edited by JonySky (2019-04-23 08:24:55)

JonySky · 2019-04-23 08:23:00

Thaulos wrote:

Resources can be made to be infinite long term but finite on the short term. You can have mines regenerate iron over time just like wells regenerate water.
The main issue imo is that the civilizations right now are always the same. You find a place with soil/ponds and enough trees for kindling and you start your town. Every town will start with the same starting conditions and it will grow essentially the same. This means towns do not have variety like they always had in real life.
In real life towns weren't always made for the same reasons. One town might be a "mining town" created because the area was iron rich or copper rich. Another town might be a farming town having rich soil and abundant water. Another town might be a fishing town because of the availability of sea resources. Another town was created artificially for government or a trading town because it happens to be in the middle of a trading route.
We have no such diversity in OHOL. Every town is the same. Every town has the same resources. You get essentially the same life in every town depending on the "town progress". If every town is the same there is no reason for trade, war, conquest, colonization, expansion.
If you want to rework resources somehow, then you can make it so that towns need to either specialize or make it accessible to have satellite towns. If a farming town grew enough but needed iron for example. They could go the distance and settle a second town where iron is available. Maybe not a permanently settlement at first, but maybe some food storage, some infrastructure (like horse parking). Then over time it could make sense to have a more sizable and permanent town pumping out iron not only for that farming town but also for other farming towns around them. Maybe the mining town would be 100% dependent on food coming from these farm towns.
Maybe iron on mines could regenerate based on how many people live nearby or add some sort of labor intensive process to retrieve iron that needs to be processed on the same place.
I had this idea of "regions" which would be a sort of virtual region on top of the biomes we have right now. These regions would be specialized in resources. Maybe in one you could have iron ore. On another you could grow tomatoes/onions, on another you had shrimps and fish. This could also allow for more trade with other towns.
Right now it's too hard to make a temporary settlement where food isn't available. Food takes too much space and you can only take yourself. If you had like wagons that could carry more people and more food then maybe you could have a sort of trading caravan which could carry more stuff around.

+1

futurebird · 2019-04-23 11:34:18

Amon wrote:

On a single or only a few eves. New surnames should be able to be created, say by rewarding marriage behaviour, then the spouses can can say, "we are the masons" and if the surnames match, now they begun a new bloodline, and relation should be changes distantly related for all but imediate family (sister in law, mother, grandmother, uncle, niece, cousins etc). Like imo it would be stupid to have a map filled with XY's which are so far removed you effectively are not related in the real world.

Really good idea and good point about how last names don't fully capture how closely you might be related or not. I also think this would decrease people wanting to Eve because some of what is driving that is picking a last name and seeing it thrive.

A_person_1234 · 2019-04-23 12:30:47

emilyjb2 wrote:

I reiterate what others have said: there’s little reason to trade when the map is so homogenous, and each town is a self-contained ecosystem. In order to facilitate trade (and culture). Regions of the map need to specialize. And, we need to be able to live with different starting resources. As someone else said, we need desert towns and snow towns and jungle towns. Right now, you NEED grassland/swamp to survive. As such, every town looks and functions so similarly that they’re almost forgettable.
My suggestion is to greatly expand the existing biomes and fill them differently. Biomes need to be larger. And towns should be able to flourish within these biomes without needing too many resources from neighboring biomes for basic-level survival.
Maybe iron and other metals stay in the mountains. But there should be an expansion of wood and stone tools. Maybe they break easier (there’s still a reason to get iron), but it stops being ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.
Clothing and food should differ between biomes. In the snow, you can’t farm, but you hunt seals and fish. You clothes yourself with yak furs and build igloos. In the tropics, you farm yams and bananas and sugarcane. You tame elephants for riding. You build homes with palm fronds and make mosquito nets for protection.
We need replacements for clay and sheep and berries in ALL biomes. Nothing needs to function the same, but we need to be able to live (even if it’s difficult... grassland would probably always be easier than desert for instance) in all biomes. And biomes need to be made bigger (like 2000k tiles).

Yes! This is exactly what I'm imagining. It would be a huge undertaking but it would be so incredible. I imagine the snow biomes having fishing towns around patches of ice holes. Many villages would specialize around sheep or mining in the mountains. Maybe grassland biomes would have groundhog holes instead of rabbit holes, or have squirrels spawn by trees for fur.

Wuatduhf · 2019-04-23 12:54:08

jasonrohrer wrote:

Looking for thoughts here.

Jason, if there's anything you take away from the conversations here, I hope you will look into, or try to research, another game that attempted political/social experiment using Minecraft called CivCraft. I've tried to dig some of its history up at a glance, but it will take time to really pull up anything for you.

At the very least, this is a map of what its community of 200-300 players created. Each 'city-state' is its own political organization with near-0 population overlap.

This map had a 15k radius, was played on for about 4-5 years, and by the end of it, only ~4-10% of total map resources had been exploited.

CivCraft 2.0 Map

Last edited by Wuatduhf (2019-04-23 12:59:21)

Spoonwood · 2019-04-23 15:04:57

Tarr wrote:

Slow fires are perfect tiles as long as they're not in a hot biome or inside a building. This of course means that people setting babies on a fire inside a building are derps, and children that don't stand next to the fire are either not caring about their drain rate or too new to know better. I don't think the temperature has much correlation to whether people care about their lineage so that bit seems a little silly.

That's not so much how I see things have changed. It's more like this. Let's say that you're farming.

Back before the temperature overhaul, you would just place your child down on the desert edge (or jungle spot much more rarely) and keep on farming. Your child said 'F', you went to your child and fed him or her. Fairly simple to not overfeed your child all that much.

Now you take your child over to the fire. If you run away and farm, then the nurse keeps picking him or her up, as those nurses don't wait for 'F' or seem to have a clue as to how long it takes a child to starve when near or on fire (I'm not getting into the fine details of whether or not standing on a large slow fire is perfect temperature or not... it's not that much different, and nurses usually pick up children well before they get to one pip). So, there's more overfeeding of children, and thus the moms need more food sans considerations of temperature.

Of course that doesn't affect moms who give their children tours or hold their children and tell them about biome locations or something like that which might be valuable. But, I do think that families have fewer resources because of how child rearing now effectively worse post temperature overhaul. And that means that the temperature overhaul had the opposite effect of encouraging people to care about their lineages. That said, it was not as bad as the water guzzling and kindling burning radio updates.

Thanks for the counter-argument on clothes. Not sure if it's correct, especially given the reaction to a post I made about the new clothes (basically some people said that they will wear clothes for function and not care about function), but it's good to have a contrasting argument on the value of the new clothes which at least has something to it.

Redram · 2019-04-23 15:38:34

For trade, well, like I suggested last time, you need to give families the ability to control EXCLUSIVE resources. That's how trade happens. Civilization-style 'wonders' that only one town can build on the whole server, thus giving them exclusive monopoly on the resource that 'wonder' creates. These will necessarily involve higher tech. Then you make a wonder-tech web, that involves needing items from different wonders to create higher tech. This necessitates trade for anyone that wants the really good stuff. If you also want war, make it so only a family can take over a wonder from another. Then they have the option of trading or fighting.

The notion of making a large web of 'luxury' items might work. If they are all appealing. We already have tons of useless 'luxury' goods and mushrooms are the only really interesting one, for the laughs. How are you going to duplicate that across a web? I think it would be hard to balance. Is anyone seriously going to trade a car for any number of mushrooms?

Giving regions 'specialties' will not work at it stands. There are too many food types and all the farmable ones - by nature - are unlimited, none is worth trading iron for, since the majority can be produced anywhere. If you limited what can be 'farmed' in a given region, it probably won't matter because every region would still need a complement of local foods, or nobody can survive there to start. Such a region would be strictly for colonization from another town. Jason has already said that he doesn't want to make every region have it's own distinct tech web. This makes sense. Why should he spend 6x the effort making what will effectively be re-sprited items, vs using that effort to make 6x the actual new content? I would vastly prefer new content over re-spriting existing stuff. moreover region specialties will naturally make people settle at region borders, to access the maximum number of biomes. Jason is going to end up having to constantly be re-balancing and chasing exploitative behavior. You can't make the biomes too large or trade will never happen outside of airplanes. Too small and it's too easy to access them all. Wonder-style resources avoid that issue, since you can build the wonders wherever.

As for making people care about their family here and now without return mechanics? Good luck. That's really up to the player. They have to be the type of person that wants to establish rp connections. This already happens. The other type are the job and tech oriented players. I don't think they'll care, without the ability to come back and hopefully continue a project/work at a higher tech level.

Shrinking island is a bad idea. All that will happen is Tarr and the other techno-players will figure out where the center is, and build their town there. In a shrinking map scenario the most valuable thing is the real estate that will be consumed last. So this mode automatically favors those who know how to coord dive.

Limited map may work, depends on a lot of other factors including how trade is set up. But I think you should limit it regardless. I never did understand why you thought the map needed to be 'larger than earth' Jason. Everything is so same-ey it doesn't matter. What's the largest eve spiral that has ever happened? That will suggest a starting point.

I don't like limiting eves. People like to be eves. You'll get more people leaving town to start their own probably. If you limit eves I do agree with whoever talked about allowing marriage to change name of that branch of family. However it should require a spouse from a different surname, not the same. This can give rise to scenarios where two families get into conflict, and some amongst them opt out and start their own new families, far from the war. I could also see it as increasing murder of strange men, who would probably have a tendency to 'steal' women from the existing family. Which is true to life historically, I think. And very bad for the existing family, in the game.

Last edited by Redram (2019-04-23 15:43:03)

happynova · 2019-04-23 16:18:01

jasonrohrer wrote:

I want town leadership to be necessary, because the challenge is so difficult

Town leadership would already be a very useful thing in a lot of circumstances. The reason it doesn't happen, I'd say, isn't because it's not valuable, it's because it's prohibitively difficult.

Well, OK, not always. Eve is often essentially the leader and organizer in a starting settlement. Heck, I was even a king once, with everyone coming to me for advice about what they should do and expecting me to defend them from griefers. That was a really cool life. But I'm pretty sure the only reason it worked was because that was a very small town, and I never had more than maybe six or seven people to lead. Large, complicated towns with double-digit numbers of people are just about impossible to coordinate. To figure out everything that the town needs and what to do about it and to talk to everyone and convince them that you're someone who should be listened to and get them organized... In a large and populous town, that takes more time than anyone actually has.

(It also occurs to me that if leaders do become absolutely necessary, anyone who's not using the zoom mod to keep track of what's going on may be at a hefty enough disadvantage to put them completely out of the running for the job. As a purist who has so far avoided adopting the mod, I don't find that a pleasant thought. There are already enough jobs I feel like I shouldn't be the one doing because I'm not capable of zooming.)

jasonrohrer wrote:

I think that the new property fences are a step in the right direction here, and I myself have already seen some interesting new stories come out of them. I tried to start a private milkweed farm during my life with my kids, and unbeknownst to me, my younger sister tried to do the same thing on the other side of town. Hers was much more successful and ended up flourishing beautifully. Mine ended up pretty much failing by the end of my life. At one point, I had to beg her to borrow a hoe that I needed to get mine off the ground. Then my kids forgot to save seeds from their first crop, so I had to beg her again for seeds to resow. It was actually a bit humiliating, and it made me jealous, and I thought briefly about killing her and taking over her farm. Anyway, it was a new story. Normally, I'd just walk over and pick the milkweed, or grab the hoe. Having to ask, and having her trust me, was a new type of story. I also saw a kid come up to my sister and explain that he needed rope to make snares. She had to decide whether to give him rope or not. Good stuff.

Jason, I love stories more than almost anything in life, myself. But I gotta say, there's a problem with this story. It's a bad story. You and your sister had a common goal that would benefit everybody, and it would have gone fine if you'd worked together, or even if one of you had done the job and left the other one to it and gone off to do something else useful, but instead you worked inefficiently and at cross-purposes and came into unnecessary conflict over problems you created for yourselves. That's the story you just told, and it's dumb.

OK, yes, tales of human greed, short-sightedness and stupidity making a perfectly good situation worse for everyone can sometimes make for good fiction, but, hoo boy, is that not a story I want to play. To the extent that I'm seriously considering just sitting this game out for a while now, or breaking my long-standing policy of basically never using /die and just bailing out when I see property fences. Because right now, those are the kinds of stories they seem to generate.

As it stands, the fences can pretty much only ever make things worse in terms of having a functional town that keeps everyone fed. The thing is, except in times of extreme and acute famine, nothing in OHOL right now is inherently zero-sum, or certainly nothing important is. Even if you take the rope I was going to use for a cart in order to make a bucket, I still have access to the bucket, and to the crops grown with the water from it. (Or the milk it holds, or the iron it helps mine.)

Giving us the fences without giving us a genuine reason to need them, something that actually increases long-term survival or allows us to do or have things we wouldn't otherwise have access to, that's just completely backwards. Right now, fences make bad stories in which people hurt their own chances of survival and the overall success of their community. And that's true even if you're the rich person inside the fence with all the stuff. I was born outside a fence like that the other day. I'm a good worker who knows the game well and lives to help out, not to mention being a fertile woman, but did the folks inside that fence get the benefit of that? Nope. What a waste. Instead I just died outside with no resources, and believe me, I have never cared less about my family in this game than I did in that moment.

To make the fences anything but counter-productive, OHOL needs to become, at least in some part, a zero-sum game, a game in which cooperation is not always the better choice than competition. (Mind you, whether it will then be a game I want to play or not, I don't know. I love stories and want more variety in them in the game, too, but one of the things I have loved about OHOL is that it's one of the very few places where the stories are cooperative. It's nice. I mean, The Castle Doctrine seems like a very clever and interesting game, but I don't think it's one I'd want to play, myself. That kind of non-stop stress and paranoia doesn't seem like a good time to me. And I'd hate to see OHOL turn into a game about nothing but protecting what's yours from outsiders. I get enough of xenophobia IRL.)

jasonrohrer wrote:

So, some crazy, off-the wall ideas:
1. OHOL played on a finite map.
2. OHOL played on a shrinking map (an island with a rising tide).

So, turning it into Fortnite? OHOL Battle Royale mode?

jasonrohrer wrote:

What if there was only ONE Eve on the map at a time? One big family, until it died out?

I don't have a fundamental problem with this, but doesn't it kind of contradict what you say you want? You want people to care about preserving their families, but you also want conflict and the possibility to preserve what you have at the expense of others. How does that work if everyone is your family? Indeed, that's already part of the issue. I don't want to compete with others in my town, because those people are my family. (Even the ones that are adopted, really.)

jasonrohrer wrote:

Less off-the wall is something where OHOL is always played right around the center, instead of an auto-spiral exploring further and further into fresh territory. Resources will run out, and people will need to go further and further on their own, which will eventually become impractical. Though migration would still be possible. Migration itself is an interesting story, but much more interesting if you're migrating into a civilized area rather than endless wilderness. Early OHOL was effectively played this way, and there was a major milkweed shortage in the middle of the map.

I think this has potential, maybe. Well, at some point, assuming things went on long enough, the area around the center would become completely unviable, and there would not be enough time to migrate. So many a very tight spiral, to allow for at least the potential for things not to crash entirely?

And there's still a question about why anyone would care to fight over the limited resources along the way, up before the meta-meta crash.

Yes, this is the fundamental question. All else is distraction. What's actually worth fighting over? What do you get more real, short- and long-term advantage out of keeping to yourself than sharing, even when everything is going well? What does someone else have that you genuinely need or even very badly want? I suspect the only good way to make the answer to this something other than "essentially nothing" lies in limiting resources in ways such that towns or families can specialize in them. E. g., having parts of the tech tree that require both Resource A and Resource B, but never having them occur to close to each other. That sort of thing.

But if we're throwing out wild thoughts... What if you're concentrating too much on the man vs. man aspects of conflict and competition? What if man vs. nature might help provide a key? Natural disasters, perhaps? If there's a possibility of everything you've built in a particular area being wiped out at least badly damaged, that puts on pressure not just to reach a steady-state but to stockpile and expand, as well as creating sudden and potentially disastrous shortages. What do you do when a tornado ravages your crops? Can you coordinate well enough to get back on your feet? Do you raid another settlement for their supplies? Did someone have the foresight to stockpile reserves somewhere else? Did someone else suffer a disaster and raid the reserves you stockpiled?

I think I might actually quite like that idea, now that I think about it. If only because it's something in the world that actually gives people a reason to have conflicts and face challenges, rather than trying to artificially social engineer them into making things harder for themselves.

jinbaili83 · 2019-04-23 16:57:11

What if randomnes was introduced to domestication of animals and plants, so that one can not expect to get best result first try.
Town wolud have to spend to much resourses to master all at once. It will have to specialize in one or two and buy others from
neighboring towns.
To counter lack of easy farming hunting big animals could be buffed. Now only meat that can be eaten without steel knife is rabbit.

Spoonwood · 2019-04-23 17:07:12

happynova wrote:

OK, yes, tales of human greed, short-sightedness and stupidity making a perfectly good situation worse for everyone can sometimes make for good fiction, but, hoo boy, is that not a story I want to play. To the extent that I'm seriously considering just sitting this game out for a while now, or breaking my long-standing policy of basically never using /die and just bailing out when I see property fences. Because right now, those are the kinds of stories they seem to generate.

Just to remind you there's also the option of playing on a low pop server and building your own place over time or with others who, if they keep you, probably will play co-operatively.

I agree with what you said about happynova and Jason's story *especially* since Jason has emphasized that he wants us to care about our family's survival. As you point out, there is no need for property fences for lineage survival and it's hard to imagine them as anything but counter-productive towards that end at this point in time at least, if not indefinitely. Even property fence sheep pens don't end up so nice, since they have to get maintained.

I also agree that families vs. nature is a better approach than artificial conflicts within families or between families because of changes in game mechanics.

I've thought that blights might be something to improve the game. If blights spread over crops directly adjacent but not over an empty tile, that might motivate people to build more efficient farms.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-04-23 17:09:01)

Booklat1 · 2019-04-23 17:13:03

happynova wrote:

...

very reasonable comment

mrbah · 2019-04-23 17:16:56

If you want to force this, make a unique natural ressource needed to advance tech, spawn it halfway between two somewhat advanced towns and give each town a notification where the ressource is.
the ressource should not be plentiful for both villages to create everything they might want to.

Not elegant but it would achieve what I think you are trying to get us to do, compete.

Spoonwood · 2019-04-23 17:21:05

jasonrohrer wrote:

As I've said many times, I want your decisions in the game to matter, at all levels. I want running a successful village to be hard, and I want you to care enough to get good at handling that challenge. I want town leadership to be necessary, because the challenge is so difficult, and I want disagreements and politics to unfold around that leadership. I want the survival of your family to really matter to you.

End OHOL murder.

happynova · 2019-04-23 17:25:50

Spoonwood wrote:

Just to remind you there's also the option of playing on a low pop server and building your own place over time or with others who, if they keep you, probably will play co-operatively.

Yeah, but that wouldn't really give me what I like about this game, either. Personal base-building bores me. I want lots of random, different lives and never knowing exactly what I'm going to get! I want varied and unique life stories. I want the experience of taking whatever life I'm born into and seeing what I can do with it. I want the experience of contributing to a place for a small amount of time and moving on, feeling the hope that it will do well and I might see it again some day without feeling the need to control and direct it myself. I'm happy to be a small, temporary part of something larger than myself, something I might not ever see the end of.

In other words, I want to play the game exactly the way Jason says he wants people to play it, which makes it kind of ironic that his pursuit of those goals, and of some of the other things he also wants to do, may have just kind of broken me a little.

Spoonwood wrote:

I agree with what you said about happynova and Jason's story *especially* since Jason has emphasized that he wants us to care about our family's survival.

Yeah. "I want you to care about your family more than anything! Hey, isn't it great that this update made me want to stab my sister for no good reason?" Heh.

Spoonwood wrote:

I've thought that blights might be something to improve the game. If blights spread over crops directly adjacent but not over an empty tile, that might motivate people to build more efficient farms.

I actually made that suggestion, too, ages and ages ago when Jason was trying to figure out how to make it worthwhile for people to grow a variety of foods. I think the yum bonus worked better for that, so I'm not sure how I feel about the idea now. To be honest, I wasn't sure how I felt about it then. But I think more environmental pressures to respond to is a really promising possible approach.

futurebird · 2019-04-23 17:27:51

I agree with happynova. I love to cooperate and help other people and be helped and maybe fight some griefers now and then. I could even get in to a war story if it was organic enough. But, being pushed in to an eat or be eaten world isn't what I think of when I think "building a civilization" I mostly want to end a life knowing I made the place better for the future. That's what gives me the buzz in the early game so consistently and in the late game often too.

If this is going to be about who can be the most ruthless and grab the most and dominate I don't have the desire to try to win at that. It's a valid kind of game, and lots of games are like that but for me it isn't "fun" or "emotionally rewarding" -- it's just frustrating if I can't be the one on top and even if I am the one with all the goodies it's hollow for me.

This isn't because I'm some sort of super nice person either I worry it sounds that way. It's just about what games offer and there are so few games that offer the chance to be the hero by helping others.

Or as I said in another conversation here "who will want to play as all the peasants?" No one will. And I'm not volunteering.

Booklat1 · 2019-04-23 17:35:10

futurebird wrote:

I agree with happynova. I love to cooperate and help other people and be helped and maybe fight some griefers now and then. I could even get in to a war story if it was organic enough. But, being pushed in to an eat or be eaten world isn't what I think of when I think "building a civilization" I mostly want to end a life knowing I made the place better for the future. That's what gives me the buzz in the early game so consistently and in the late game often too.
If this is going to be about who can be the most ruthless and grab the most and dominate I don't have the desire to try to win at that. It's a valid kind of game, and lots of games are like that but for me it isn't "fun" or "emotionally rewarding" -- it's just frustrating if I can't be the one on top and even if I am the one with all the goodies it's hollow for me.
This isn't because I'm some sort of super nice person either I worry it sounds that way. It's just about what games offer and there are so few games that offer the chance to be the hero by helping others.
Or as I said in another conversation here "who will want to play as all the peasants?" No one will. And I'm not volunteering.

but bird, we're incredibly far from that, we need at least some competition

i'm sorry if calling you nice the other day came out wrong btw, but if you look at it reasonably you'll see that before we start starving there's some alternatives to stuff running out (less iron means more hatcheds, less kindling means oil is important)

its not eat or starve unless jason freaks the fuck out

happynova · 2019-04-23 17:43:23

Booklat1 wrote:

but if you look at it reasonably you'll see that before we start starving there's some alternatives to stuff running out (less iron means more hatcheds, less kindling means oil is important)

its not eat or starve unless jason freaks the fuck out

It is if someone locks up all the food and the milkweed and the iron.

Booklat1 · 2019-04-23 17:48:24

happynova wrote:

Booklat1 wrote:
but if you look at it reasonably you'll see that before we start starving there's some alternatives to stuff running out (less iron means more hatcheds, less kindling means oil is important)

its not eat or starve unless jason freaks the fuck out
It is if someone locks up all the food and the milkweed and the iron.

but you need to be a complete idiot to let all these things happen

even if it does, any good player can at least try to scavenge

happynova · 2019-04-23 18:15:47

Booklat1 wrote:

but you need to be a complete idiot to let all these things happen
even if it does, any good player can at least try to scavenge

Dude, all I did to end up in that situation was get born on the wrong side of a fence. In an area with really crappy scavenging, as it turned out. It was not worth an hour of my time. Futurebird is right. Who wants to be the peasant? Not me, either. Nor do I have any desire to be the person on the "good" side of the fence, screwing everybody else over for no other reason than because I can.

Which isn't to say that all competition is bad, by any means. I don't think even the most kumbaya among us are saying that. But one of the great things about this game is that it's not yet another thing that's all about killing everybody else and taking their stuff. There can be more of a balance between competition and cooperation, and probably should be, but that's a delicate balance to achieve, and if it goes too far the other direction, I'm not interested in that, either. If I wanted that, I could get it anywhere.

(Edited to correct a couple of typos.)

Last edited by happynova (2019-04-23 18:18:39)

Booklat1 · 2019-04-23 18:22:44

happynova wrote:

Booklat1 wrote:
but you need to be a complete idiot to let all these things happen
even if it does, any good player can at least try to scavenge
Dude, all I did to end up in that situation was get born on the wrong side of a fence. In an area with really crappy scavenging, as it turned out. It was not worth an hour of my time. Futurebird is right. Who wants to be the peasant? Not me, either. Nor do I have any desire to be the person on the "good" side of the fence, screwing everybody else over for no other reason than because I can.

you can literally /die and roll again for a family in which your ancestors arent idiots

btw, this is an issue with fences, not balance, which is literally the only thing i care for at this point

Last edited by Booklat1 (2019-04-23 18:23:51)

happynova · 2019-04-23 18:42:43

Booklat1 wrote:

btw, this is an issue with fences, not balance, which is literally the only thing i care for at this point

Well, fences currently unbalance things, rather than making them more balanced, is part of my point.

If all you want to talk about is resource balancing, though, that seemed like a bit of a non sequitur from the post you were responding to, which was making a much more general point, so I got a little confused. But I suspect I sort of came in there in the middle of a conversation you were carrying over with Futurebird from somewhere else. If so, my apologies.

Turnipseed · 2019-04-23 19:17:30

Resources have been a touchy subject for a long time even before decay.

In towns a year ago before sheep pooped and when you needed a full bush to make compost you got stabbed if someone saw you eat a berry. Ever.

When only seeding carrots used soil, and wild carrots respawned seeds. you could get stabbed for the possesion of a dug wild carrot.

Burying bodies will still get you stabbed and up until the last update planting potatos got you killed because it uses iron.

Some people get stabbed for eating a carrot because "thats for sheep"

If you use the last bucket of water from the steam well without refilling the pump you can get stabbed.

Resources are, and have always been contended. I dont know where anyone gets off saying they arent.

Now if you mean why dont two familys fight over resources. Its because we are all to far apart. Or if we get close together all of the people just move to live in the better town.

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-23 19:24:58

CivCraft is an interesting case, maybe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxS8cUbWYg4

There's also this pretty famous article about a Minecraft economy experiment:

https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html

While the "specialization by region" idea is interesting and might work.... unfortunately, it's outside the scope of what I can tackle here. Having a viable tech tree in each biome is just too much for me. One viable tech tree is hard enough.

Also, people in real life trade INSIDE the same region, based on voluntary specialization. My friend grew strawberries down the road from me, and I programmed computers. If he had a problem with the electronic components on his farm, I might help him in exchange for strawberries. Also, I definitely engaged in "share picking" of his strawberries, where I'd pick 20 pounds and get to keep 5 for free, trading my labor for fruit. None of these things had anything to do with regional differences, or "bananas traded for apples."

So, while regional differences might help a bit, I don't think they get to the heart of why people trade.

When my sister had the ONLY milkweed seeds around, I had to trade with her, or at least negotiate with her. I had no choice. If she had said, "Sure, I'll give you some seeds, but bring me two buckets of water first," I would have done it.

So, I think scarcity and exclusivity (property rights) are sufficient to motivate trade and conflict over resources.

I hear you about the "one last name" thing being weird, currently. With the fences, my kids and grandkids really felt like my own little clan, separate from the rest of the village. We were motivated to work together, because of our shared ownership, so we stuck together. It was the first time I can recall really keeping track of my own kids and grandkids throughout my life (I usually only encounter them in passing, and they're all mixed in with a heap of cousins, etc).

I'm not sure how to handle this.... though I have thought about male characters getting to pick their own names, somehow. Not sure. Your connection to Eve is important, still, but then there's this new sub-group getting made. Could be a middle name, but then we have the same problem again (how is that middle name replaced, later down the line).

In modern life, this currently happens through intermarriage, where the new father's last name takes over, and the last name matches the Y chromosome of every male in the family.

But historically, where did last names come from, before the solidified to track male lineages? A lot of them seem to be occupational. So it does seem that individual men picked or were assigned last names at some point, and then those names were passed down after that to track male lineages. It kinda boggles the mind. There are so many last names in the world (millions), and each one currently has a unique Y chromosome associated with it, essentially, which means that at some point long ago, there were millions of unique men starting lines, but where did they all come from, and how did they become unique?

One Hour One Life Forums

#26 2019-04-23 06:51:27

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#27 2019-04-23 07:53:43

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#28 2019-04-23 08:00:20

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#29 2019-04-23 08:23:00

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#30 2019-04-23 11:34:18

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#31 2019-04-23 12:30:47

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#32 2019-04-23 12:54:08

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#33 2019-04-23 15:04:57

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#34 2019-04-23 15:38:34

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#35 2019-04-23 16:18:01

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#36 2019-04-23 16:57:11

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#37 2019-04-23 17:07:12

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#38 2019-04-23 17:13:03

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#39 2019-04-23 17:16:56

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#40 2019-04-23 17:21:05

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#41 2019-04-23 17:25:50

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#42 2019-04-23 17:27:51

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#43 2019-04-23 17:35:10

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#44 2019-04-23 17:43:23

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#45 2019-04-23 17:48:24

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#46 2019-04-23 18:15:47

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#47 2019-04-23 18:22:44

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#48 2019-04-23 18:42:43

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#49 2019-04-23 19:17:30

Re: Ideas for resource contention

#50 2019-04-23 19:24:58

Re: Ideas for resource contention

Board footer