a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Current system
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Everyone can make everything at any age and without any prerequirements, a 5 year old can make a plane or a water pump without any training in engineering.
There is no official professions so anyone can switch from being the baker, to being farmer or tailor without any specific nerf or buff.
Families are like one big tribe and there are no official dads.
This has some perks mainly that you can do wathever job you want without any restrictions.
But it also has some problems, mainly that if eveyone can do anything, why trade?
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Trading
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Trade in real life happens for multiple reasons: rarity of ressource, time spent, knowledge requirement, uniqueness etc.
Making ressources exclusive to places like far away regions would be annoying for basic ressources, it could be doable with more advanced ressources but wouldnt make sense with the current biome system.
Time spent is one way but since everything is shared the time spent doing something is too.
Unique objects are not in the game atm, there is no unique art that you could trade, like a painting or musical piece etc.
Knowledge requirement is one of the most viable options imo and one that makes sense, why would everyone know everything?
Irl it takes years of training to be able to do advanced mechanics, or forging, or even baking efficiently.
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New system
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Professions:
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Recipes are divided into professions (except basic recipes).
The more you craft in that profession the better you get, learning more advanced recipes.
If you are new in a profession you have a probability to fail a recipe (nerf), rabbit can escape, you only get 2 pie per dough instead of 4, hoe breaks easier etc (this would use the probability system).
If you are more experienced you have a probability to be more efficient (buff), getting more ball of threads per fleece, more milkweed per row etc. Percentage and quantities would be dependent on your skill level.
If we have professions and access to unique recipes then some objects would become more rare and challenging to make hence worth trading.
That wouldnt be enough to change the current system, there would be professions but it would still be one big village/tribe that shares everything, which is fine.
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Families
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What if families would be different than tribes and have different advantages?
What if there was a personnal skill level and a family skill level?
When you are born your family teaches you stuff, so someone born in a family of bakers would have a higher skill in baking from the start.
Children born without dad (current system) would only get part of the skill from their mom (maybe even less than if in a family) so founding a family would have the advantage to give part of the knowledge from both parents to the future generations.
The idea is that tribes are usually less advanced in technology than family based societal systems.
Since the language update is coming up, official families would also make more sense.
You could only marry someone from another family and newborn children would know the language of both parents and would have a part of their knowledge (skill level).
If you dont work in a specific profession you lose skill over time, but the drop would be slower than it is fast to learn, so one generation could make the skill of the future generations go up and several lazy generations would be needed to make the skill go down.
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The objective
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The goal is to make it balanced to the point where each separate family has their own profession and trading would be a necessity or a big advantage over trying to do everything yourself.
There could be different tiers of recipes and some very advanced recipes could need multiple generations to be able to make, passing down the knowledge over generations.
"My father thought me to make a frequency transmitter, which gave me the idea to make a radio, i will teach this to my son" and so on.
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Higher difficulty but higher reward
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Now what prevents everyone to just merge together in one big mess of different families,tribes etc and just share everything?
Well the idea is that not having a profession, not having families and staying in a tribe/big village setting would be so inneficient and waste so many ressources that big merged messes would eventually die out and even possibly relatively fast because too many people.
Properties would branch out from the main city and trading would naturally emerge.
A family of smith could still bake and farm but it would be so inneficient and use so many more ressource that trading with the baker family for pies would be much easier and make much more sense.
Villages would be closer together and the challenge would be to use the ressources efficiently with the risk of having the whole area die out.
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Tribes Vs Families in the long run
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Tribes would usually have an average skill level in about every professions so they could be able to sustain themselves for a couple of generations but over time on the long run would die out because they use ressources too inneficiently, unless they stay in small groups and live off small amount of ressources.
But higher populations would need families, properties,trading and specific professions or the use of ressources would be so high that the whole area would eventually die out.
For example a tribe would make on average 2 pies per wheat but an expert family of bakers would make 6 on average, this would be the same for tailoring, smithing, farming etc.
Over time if a tribe gets too big and doesn't branch out into families it will use all the ressources of the area and die out.
There could even be a system where if you see someone craft, your skill gets better in that profession it would only be a small percent but it would make so tribes are not totally unbalanced compared to families and make logical sense since you can learn by watching too, the percent could even be higher if someone from the same family is crafting, so having families dedicated to professions would have a big advantage over tribes.
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Specialization in professions
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There could be a skill level for general profession like every craft in the baker category and a skill level for a specific craft(sub profession) like making specifically dough on plate or mutton pies, doing a specific recipe would level up skill for that particular recipe faster than just doing general crafting in that category (should be balanced compared to number of times recipe is done on server to not make it too easy to be expert in dough platting for example).
We could also have specialized professions like engineer - specialist in oil pumping and refining, an average person trying to pump oil would have a probability to fail at the cost of a use of the pump but the expert would have a probability to get more oil.
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What crafting would be like
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Implementing this could be as easy as either making the craft not happening and wasting a use or object (fail), making the recipe happen (normal) or making the recipe happen but still keeping the object in hand or not consume a use (win).
Probabilities and percents would depend on the level of skill of the person doing the craft.
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TLDR:
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Not trading, not having properties and not having families specialized in professions could make villages die out in the long run.
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Last edited by Dodge (2019-05-10 19:00:28)
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