Lychee's Mega Suggestion Thread (On Trade, Technology, and More)

lychee · 2019-05-09 01:40:23

Hi everyone, I got the game recently and it's been a whole lot of fun!

I noticed that there seems to be a lot of discussion on the forums regarding how to encourage trade, so I thought I would give my thoughts. Some of these ideas are really drastic though!

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INCENTIVES TO TRADE: UNEVEN RESOURCE DISTRIBUTION

In my honest opinion, the only way to make long-distance trade work is an uneven distribution of resources.

The way the game currently is, the biomes are tiny and every village has access to virtually every biome and resource. It only takes a few steps to walk into the jungle for rubber and another couple into the tundra for oil. In theory, virtually every settlement is self-sufficient in their capacity to travel up the entire technology tree.

If settlements are self-sufficient, there is absolutely no reason to trade, and instead we get mega-cities.

INCREASING WATER SCARCITY WILL NOT LEAD TO MORE TRADE

The recent changes with regards to natural springs and wells is interesting, but it won't result in more trade.

Suppose you have one town with water and a nearby town that doesn't have water.

Making an essential resource (water) more scarce only encourages players to abandon and migrate away from the settlement when an essential resource is depleted.

The major point here is that trade needs to be bilateral in order to work. Each party must have something that the other party wants, and both parties must gain something from the trade.

PROPOSAL 1: DISTRIBUTE NON-ESSENTIAL DESIRABLE RESOURCES EXTREMELY UNEVENLY ACROSS THE WORLD

My suggestion is that non-essential resources need to be distributed far more unevenly in the game.

For instance, make bananas spawn in very dense and large clusters thousands of tiles apart. A majority of settlements won't have access to bananas, but a tiny minority will live in "banana heaven" swimming with bananas everywhere.

Honestly, I think the biomes should be far larger. I personally think it's quite silly that a village can sit within walking distance of all the biomes.

PROPOSAL 2: RECONSIDER WHAT AN "ESSENTIAL" RESOURCE IS

Currently, water scarcity drives a race up the water technology tree. It is impossible for a village to survive for long without advanced pumps, which implies that rubber, sulfur, and palm oil are currently all "essential" resources.

I saw another thread regarding "how fast is technology advancement too fast?", and I agree with the general point. Currently, the game forces villages to develop the equivalent of modern (e.g. diesel) technology or else face extinction. Consequently, virtually all settlements are under heavy pressure to advance from the stone age to the modern era in only a few generations.

I personally think this is too fast and too extreme.

In real life (history), primitive villages didn't exactly evolve technology out of necessity. Rather, in most cases technology evolved out of convenience. For instance, refrigerators were developed to extend the shelf life of food -- not because food is inedible otherwise.

In my opinion, technological advancement should increase the efficiency and ease that the game is played, and it shouldn't be mandatory for industries that are "essential" for the survival for a "primitive village."

Aboriginal Australians, Native Americans, First Nations peoples, and dozens of untouched tropical primitive societies have been able to persist for thousands of years even up to the 21st Century. In most cases, these cultures practice more environmentally sustainable habits than a majority of Western civilizations.

My request is for there to be some way that a "primitive village" can persist sustainably for many many generations, even in the absence of advanced technology. I think it would be nice if a majority of spawns as a player occurred in these types of villages.

I think that technological advancement should be more challenging, be a process that occurs over many generations, and require trade to progress.

However, I think that there should be some really powerful, fun, and cool rewards that come with successfully advancing technology. There are tons of possibilities!

* Electricity -- and everything that involves that makes modern life so nice, like refrigeration
* Plumbing
* Transportation of large quantities of stuff
* Increased life expectancy with better health

But the key thing is that technology advancement should be useful and beneficial!

Radios and cars are great...... but right now in the current game can we really say that they're useful?

PROPOSAL 3: CRAFTING TIME

One way to make technology advancement desirable is simply to increase the efficiency of advanced technology.

In OHOL, in my opinion, time is actually a really valuable resource.

To exploit this on the game development side, what if it took time to craft most things?

For instance: Before 1773, most cloth was produced by using a loom. However, John Kay's invention of the Flying Shuttle (which honestly isn't that complicated of a device) was able to greatly accelerate the speed that a single weaver could make cloth. Eventually, the Flying Shuttle was made obsolete by even better technology that made cloth production even faster.

A similar thing could be said about the Drop Spindle. It's actually possible to spin wool by hand, and in fact some cultures in the world have historically spun such textiles by hand. However, hand spinning is quite slow and laborious.

Durability is already implemented in OHOL, and it's quite easy to conceptualize that modern textiles are higher quality and more durable than ancient ones.

So what if advanced technology increased the speed/efficiency/ease/quality that things are done?

PROPOSAL 4: MAKE MORE REDUNDANT RECIPES FOR ESSENTIAL RESOURCES

This is especially relevant if biomes become larger and environments are drastically different from village to village, but generally speaking I think it's a good idea to have multiple recipes that produce a single product that is essential for village life.

For instance, I can think of at least a dozen ways to make rope from different natural materials (I researched this as a hobby some time ago), and it might be nice to reflect this. Rope can be made from hemp, cotton, linen, straw, tree bark (yes, tree bark!), tree roots, vines, among other things. There are tons of survival enthusiast resources online, and rope is an essential survival tool that can be made almost anywhere in the world.

That said -- not all rope is equal -- any rope will break under a certain amount of tension, so I doubt that straw rope will be good enough for a 100-lb bow. However, straw rope is good enough for something like making baskets. In fact, many modern synthetic ropes exist precisely because we needed rope that can support higher tension in special applications.

I have no idea how this might be implemented without going too crazy, but I just wanted to illustrate a few points.

I really like how both reeds and straw can be used to make baskets.

Can we have more of this?

PROPOSAL 5: BLUEPRINTS FOR TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT

This is the craziest suggestion.

The current rate of technological advancement is too fast (in my opinion).

Here I propose a system to limit the rate of technological advancement through:

A) Requiring trade to advance technology
B) Requiring Blueprints to produce advanced technology

Both of these will put temporary "ceilings" on the maximum degree of technology a settlement can reach before something special has to be done.

The concept behind "Blueprints" is that most people don't know how to make advanced machines.

I don't know how to make a diesel engine in real life, and I doubt that most ordinary people do. However, if I had the Internet -- in other words, a "Blueprint" or a recipe -- explicitly describing how to make a diesel engine step-by-step, I might have better luck.

In the current game, it's a bit silly that a five-year-old child can walk out of the nursery and start building an Newcomen Engine immediately like they were somehow magically born with the knowledge.

Under the proposed Blueprint system, players must read a Blueprint in their lifetime before they are capable of making advanced technology.

Blueprints are written on paper (which would be very expensive prior to the invention of the Printing Press), and they could be transported around from town to town (thus encouraging trade). Traveling blueprints would encourage technological revolution to occur in waves -- i.e. the Industrial Revolution.

In the absence of a Blueprint, the next level of technology would have to be researched using a Prototype. It would take a long time and a lot of effort (a few generations) before a Prototype could be completed successfully. Once a prototype is initially completed, a Blueprint could be made.

Here's an example:

Suppose that a Newcomen Atmospheric Engine is considered an Advanced Technology that requires Blueprints to produce. Player 1 lives in Village A, and Village A lacks any blueprint for a Newcomen Engine. Player 1's options are to:

1). Go traveling to find a village/town that already has a blueprint.
2). Start building a prototype -- however, this is very tedious, requires special rare ingredients for research (thus encouraging trade/travel), and won't be completed for many generations.

Skip ahead to Generation 5, and finally a Newcomen Engine Prototype is completed.

It is now up to the town to make as many copies of the Blueprint as possible and distribute it to other towns, in order to immortalize this technology. However, Blueprints are expensive to make, and a single primitive village might only have the resources to make a few copies.

Meanwhile -- this is the cool part -- there is the constant pressure of Griefers who will try to be as destructive as usual. They might try to hide Blueprints to cause important technology to be lost, and Blueprints might decay when left on the ground, but this only makes it more important for Grandma Sue to make sure that she physically passes on an important Blueprint to a trustworthy grandchild.

Thoughts?

Last edited by lychee (2019-05-09 14:41:46)

futurebird · 2019-05-09 01:53:29

lychee wrote:

In my honest opinion, the only way to make long-distance trade work is an uneven distribution of resources.

Why is there trade between NYC, LONDON and LA when they are all kinda similar in terms of local resources? You don't need uneven distribution of resources you need specialization of industries something local resources can influence, but really it comes down to what the people in one region do better than in any other region. Are German watches famous because Germany has lots of metal?

Is silicone valley there for the uh... sand? No.

I really wish people would look more at the real economies around them and how much more important a culture of excellence in making certain goods matters more than having the biggest river or the most of a given natural resource.

lychee · 2019-05-09 02:18:06

futurebird wrote:

lychee wrote:
In my honest opinion, the only way to make long-distance trade work is an uneven distribution of resources.

Why is there trade between NYC, LONDON and LA when they are all kinda similar in terms of local resources? You don't need uneven distribution of resources you need specialization of industries something local resources can influence, but really it comes down to what the people in one region do better than in any other region. Are German watches famous because Germany has lots of metal?
Is silicone valley there for the uh... sand? No.
I really wish people would look more at the real economies around them and how much more important a culture of excellence in making certain goods matters more than having the biggest river or the most of a given natural resource.

I think those are good points, but the circumstances are a little different for modern economies.

It's true that highly developed countries tend to have a greater proportion of the GDP produced by service industries, finance, and specialists. The concentration of specialists in NYC is difficult to simulate in the current version of OHOL because the spawning algorithm is fundamentally random. The types of people (in terms of knowledge and experience) who spawn in Town A are roughly the same as the types of people who spawn in Town B. Currently. there is no mechanism of the game to encourage the concentration of specialists in a "Silicon Valley" Town, and really there is no benefit to doing so right now.

For most players, Town A and Town B are equivalent, unless there is a difference of natural resources between the two.

...which brings us back to natural resources again.

I think OHOL is a better simulation of primitive societies, and as such studying trade of antiquity is a more realistic model for the game.

The distribution of obsidian, flint, copper, tin, iron, salt, etc. was much more sparse in antiquity than natural resources are simulated in OHOL. An ancient village that has access to "everything" just simply wasn't the case.

Last edited by lychee (2019-05-09 02:20:23)

A_person_1234 · 2019-05-09 02:33:07

These are some great ideas, lychee. I'd be thrilled if they made it into the game.

lychee · 2019-05-09 13:29:43

Adding some more suggestions to the tech tree using history as an inspiration.

Also going to suggest that rivers and oceans be added to the game (very important in real history)

Stone Age
- Plough that can be attached to livestock
- Horseshoe and stirrups (added to horse tree)
- More varieties of bricks
- More varieties of ceramics
- Chicken domestication
- Sundial
- Canoe
- Cave paintings
- Musical instruments

Bronze Age
- Bronze tech before iron (Tin and Copper) - can be fired in pottery kilms
- Bronze casting (use a mold to cast something)
- Bronze nails = far more durable transportation technology
- Ramp
- Papyrus
- Wheel should be around here
- Irrigation and canals - critical for farming, which originally only occurred in river valleys
- Astronomy instruments (e.g. sextant)

Iron Age
- Meteoric iron as a potential source of iron, rare but does not require smelting -- important early tech
- Bloomery to smelt iron ore and charcoal into sponge iron ("bloom"). Also produces Pig Iron which at this point is considered a waste product.
- Reheated/hammering of "bloom" to produce Wrought Iron

Medieval Age
- Watermill - CRITICAL INVENTION, no longer to to power everything with animals/manual
- Windmill - CRITICAL INVENTION, no longer to to power everything with animals/manual
- Crossbow

Roman/Chinese/Renaissance Age
- Arch
- Paper
- Concrete, cement
- Blast Furnace: Use fuel, flux (limestone), and iron ore to produce pig iron
- Finery Forge to smelt pig iron into wrought iron
- Cast iron
- Coke can now replace charcoal
- Lead smelting
- Seed drill
- Gunpowder
- Compass
- Aqueduct
- Dams
- Glass blowing
- Printing Press - CRITICAL INVENTION that revolutionized the world

Industrial Revolution
- Puddling furnace
- Steam engine
- Gear
- Screw
- Pulley
- Coal

Work in process... will return to this and add more.

lychee · 2019-05-09 15:03:20

PROPOSAL 6: SHEEP SHOULD EAT GRASS

Something missing in the current version of OHOL is that farming is the only viable way to sustain a settlement.

In real life, many types of settlements were viable in the past. For instance, it was possible for some villages to subsist entirely on fishing, and others on shepherding large flocks of domestic animals. In fact, trade (and conflict) between nomadic shepherding societies and sedentary agricultural societies is a prominent feature of ancient civilizations.

In the old days, it wasn't plausible to maintain huge sheep farms in Mesopotamian cities because large flocks of animals consume a **** ton of grass, effectively stripping the ground clean. The concept of a massive cattle farm with tiny restrictive pens is a modern concept and invention, made possible only by very sophisticated transportation economies.

Early sheep-centric tribes/civilizations had to be nomadic. They didn't have a choice.

That said, nomadic civilizations like the early arab and mongol cultures were still able to thrive even without farming. In my opinion, having a large flock of sheep should be sufficient to easily sustain a lineage.

By making sheep eat grass, civilizations will:

A) Either need to go nomadic if they like raising more than one or two sheep
B) Trade with a nomadic sheep civilization
C) Employ shepherds that take flocks outside of town to graze and come back. Pens are employed to keep animals safe from wolves at night -- not because animals can be raised inside them.

I had the opportunity to travel to tibet some years ago, and I think one thing that really left an impression on me is how a single shepherd can take a flock of hundreds and hundreds of sheep miles and kilometers away from the nearest settlement.

Last edited by lychee (2019-05-09 15:04:52)

Dodge · 2019-05-09 15:47:19

To have trade we need to have some form of scarcity with rare objects, making base ressources rare or unevenly distributed would be an issue since they are needed for the tech tree.

But what about skill/knowledge?

Right now everyone can do anything.

A 5 year old can make a diesel engine if he wants, it doesn't make sense, making that kind of advanced engineering would take years of practice.

Same to make a dress or a blue hat etc.

Since evreyone can do anything nothing has value, irl things can have value for different reasons but one of them is the skill/craft/knowledge/art.

There could be an actual techtree with different professions and levels of skill, it would take years to learn to make more advanced recipes by doing more basic ones in the same professions.

Someone that decides to be tailor would first make basic clothes then by doing them progress in skill and be able to do more advanced clothes, then dying them.

A skilled tailor for example would not only know more advanced recipes he would also be more efficient and get more ressources per craft, for example an expert tailor could get 4-5 ball of thread per fleece.

By making advanced crafts more difficult and exclusive to make, there would be more rare objects which then would have more value and a reason to be traded.

Some recipes could even be very difficult to achieve, maybe knowledge could be passed down some way in the same family or even be forgotten, the goal would be to have villages that are specialized and more efficient in one profession and would trade with another village that has another specialty.

Maybe the different ethnicities could have unique recipes, this would make unique objects that are tradeable between villages.

denriguez · 2019-05-09 17:30:09

This is a great compilation of a number of ideas I consider pretty crucial (and which I and others have suggested in various places in the past). Thanks for putting this together--it's really impressive. I especially like blueprints and nomadic shepherding

Just a quick addition, which itself has been suggested numerous times: compost should be viable via many different paths, allowing things like carrots to become regionally scarce (and thus highly prized for variety pies and other yet-to-be-invented recipes). This seems like a really simple thing, as every region could have its own version of a simple domesticated vegetable that is a gatekeeper to compost and sheep.

lychee · 2019-05-09 17:52:33

Dodge wrote:

To have trade we need to have some form of scarcity with rare objects, making base ressources rare or unevenly distributed would be an issue since they are needed for the tech tree.
But what about skill/knowledge?

Agreed! There are tons of ways to encourage/reward specialization of players, and I think any method would be a good starting point!

PROPOSAL SEVEN: RIVERS SHOULD BE THE MOST VIABLE OPTION FOR EARLY FARMING SETTLEMENTS

In real history, virtually all early agricultural civilizations were developed in river valleys that flooded periodically.

There are two reasons why this was the case. The first is access to (unlimited) fresh water. The second is that cyclical flooding of major river valleys causes the renewable deposition of fertile loam on the alluvial plains the river banks. As we know from OHOL, renewable water and fertile soil are absolutely essential for the long-term survival of any fixed settlement.

Irrigation technologies are some of the most essential developments made by early civilizations, and it would be nice to see this become part of the essential technology tree.

In the current game, OHOL attempts to address water with ponds and wells. However, in real life, these sources are impractical for large-scale intensive farming. While settlements (e.g. desert oasis) can be built and thrive in areas that lack rivers, they often require a lifestyle that is less dependent on farming and/or import food through trade.

In a river-centric game, I would envision that Eve would spawn close to rivers, and early settlements would be developed on rivers. The presence of rivers would also facilitate trade between towns, as generally speaking following a river will eventually lead to another town. Additionally, water transport is far more economical than land transport, and even today shipping (via river/sea) is the main viable way to transport large quantities of stuff. Civilizations like Ancient China are notable for the construction of mega-structures like the Grand Canal for such economic purposes. Rivers would also place an importance on the construction of bridges, ferries, barges, and other cool water technologies.

As generations progress, outposts/settlements could eventually spread deeper inland, where a greater variety of more precious resources might be concentrated. There would be strong incentives for trade between inland settlements and river settlements, since as inland settlements might not have the same capacities for food production as river settlements. However, inland settlements would possess important resources that are desirable for technology and quality-of-life improvements.

lychee · 2019-05-09 18:40:38

PROPOSAL EIGHT: FERTILITY SHOULD BE A PROPERTY OF GROUND TILES

One of the weird gimmicks about OHOL (coming as a new player who likes other survival games) is that "Fertile Soil" is only found in sparse deposits scattered on the map. A player has to take a basket and physically plop soil elsewhere on the ground. This is strange because... real life just isn't like this.

It makes me wonder: is OHOL a concrete world where the only way to grow something is to physically add soil before planting?

I grow green onions in my backyard and I don't do anything particularly special to the soil. If you take a hoe to the ground and till it, for the most part something will grow (unless your soil quality sucks). Fertility is a concern if you're repeatedly growing something in the same place (farmers), but wild soil is often good enough to plant straight away.

This proposal is a drastic suggestion on how to change the soil fertility system.

If you google how much of the world's surface area is "arable land", the number ranges somewhere between 10-25%. In other words, 10-25% of tiles in the game should be farmable (at least for a short period of time) if you simply take a hoe and till.

To make this happen, the easiest way to simply make "fertility" a property of ground tiles. When you harvest crops from land, the fertility declines, and eventually the soil will be exhausted. Fertility will slowly recover with time, but fertilizer (e.g. compost) is necessary to restore fertility quickly. Additionally, some special areas of the world (e.g. Nile river valley, Yellow River valley) have natural means to restore fertility to soil. The annual flooding of rivers into alluvial plains restores fertility to the soil, and was essential for ancient civilizations that did not have access to "composting" technology.

There are several cool things that can be done when fertility is a soil property.

One is that this can help set the groundwork for key agricultural concepts like Crop Rotation.

In medieval societies, it was common to leave fields fallow for a year or two after planting so that fertility can recover in the soil. Fallow fields would be used as grazing areas for village livestock (so it wasn't entirely useless).

However, implementation of Crop Rotation during the Agricultural Revolution allowed a drastic increase of farming output, since it's possible to grow certain plants in synergistic cycles that don't deplete the soil as much. Crop Rotation might be a cool feature to add to the game.

Last edited by lychee (2019-05-09 18:50:15)

jasonrohrer · 2019-05-10 03:42:57

There's trade happening right in my town.

Not sure why everyone is so focused on long-distance trade, New York to London or whatever.

I'm going strawberry picking on Saturday with my kids, and I don't grow strawberries myself... $12 per gallon bucket.

I could grow strawberries myself, but I'm busy making video games.

Grim_Arbiter · 2019-05-10 07:07:11

jasonrohrer wrote:

I could grow strawberries myself, but I'm busy making video games.

Well you can always plant random seeds and see what takes without even caring for it. It might be a better thing for say things like squash, but I've seen some strawberries grow without too much care. They were tiny, but they still grew in an old mans garden i knew and he hardly ever tended that thing.

Sukallinen · 2019-05-10 07:19:23

My idea about forced trade, when installing next item:

-two items, combining makes you, say, watch
-make it like mining iron/oil, except now that we have grid (with springs), installing one resource in Desert tile, say every 80th spring location that isn't viable for spring will spawn one of these two rare ores (swiss xtal, swiss casing)

-combining these two items with newcomen drill would craft watch

-No major coding
-People will be able to trade with no mass transit available now
-See what happens with non-essential stuff that's rare (crowns are kind of like this item though)

Edit: (remember always, since there's little that can be done about adding variables to map tiles without major overhaul in code and limited coding time, changes should be easy to install)
(war: just make ten fault-lines same color, next ten other etc, so different fault-lines can be used by anyone but "belong to nation BLUE" - craftable warflag that detoriates in 50 years, so ppl can prepare for war, and everyone who partakes/is within range of warflag score of die/kill/destroyed-wall/whatever shown at end of week - and your(player) new spawnpoints for next week will ALL be that next color. Anyone who wants to do something can define it beginning of week and say he "won" at end of week. Maybe make an hour of first login that week decide your color so friends can play same color)

Last edited by Sukallinen (2019-05-10 07:28:13)

BladeWoods · 2019-05-10 09:09:53

What more could be done to encourage local trading? It seems that even with free property fences, it's still too much of a hassle to own property and to trade.

I've seen plenty of people try out the property fences, but I've never seen a well running property or a property that gets passed down more than one generation. Properties usually die pretty quickly and end up a waste of space and resources. Seems most people are learning that and much less are trying properties anymore.

FeignedSanity · 2019-05-10 09:17:05

I feel like that thing Jason said a while back about changing the time a fence takes to become rickety to an hour would help (I'd leave the duration of rickety fences alone).

I find that a lot of people put their properties pretty far away from town, which makes them much easier to forget about.

Last edited by FeignedSanity (2019-05-10 09:17:26)

lychee · 2019-05-10 13:07:07

jasonrohrer wrote:

There's trade happening right in my town.
Not sure why everyone is so focused on long-distance trade, New York to London or whatever.
I'm going strawberry picking on Saturday with my kids, and I don't grow strawberries myself... $12 per gallon bucket.
I could grow strawberries myself, but I'm busy making video games.

Thank you for the reply, Jason! I really appreciate the work you've put into the game! /love

I ended up going to bed thinking about this, because there's a really a lot of deep philosophical and anthropological reasons behind this.

I think the interest in long-distance trade stems from the fact that short-distance trade (within a village) will probably never be a worthwhile action as long as property fails to exist. No property = no (short distance) trade.

You wouldn't pay $12 per gallon bucket of strawberries if the strawberry bush was in your own backyard.

In the current state of the game, most players view the entire village they are born in as communal property. A shovel, hoe, or well doesn't belong to an individual -- and if someone took one and refused to share, many people would say that is the equivalent of griefing or stealing from the village. I can't think of a single instance in the current game where property is beneficial to a village.

This raises a huge philosophical/anthropologic gap -- why does property exist on Earth when clearly it's such a bad thing on OHOL?

The funny thing about OHOL is that Friedrich Engels wrote extensively on Primitive Communism (the idea that primitive societies were basically communist out of necessity), and OHOL seems to support that theory. To quote Wikipedia:

In a primitive communist society, all able bodied persons would have engaged in obtaining food, and everyone would share in what was produced by hunting and gathering. There would be no private property, which is distinguished from personal property[6] such as articles of clothing and similar personal items, because primitive society produced no surplus; what was produced was quickly consumed and this was because there existed no division of labour, hence people were forced to work together. The few things that existed for any length of time (tools, housing) were held communally,[7] in Engels' view in association with matrilocal residence and matrilineal descent.[8] There would have been no state.

If you want property, rather than attempting to force artificial mechanisms (e.g. magical fences that keep people outside of them), I think the better approach would be to incentivize property and make it something "good" rather than "bad/griefing".

To do this properly, I think it's really important to think about the anthropologic nature of property at its deepest origins. We should really understand why property doesn't exist in OHOL before trying to do something about it.

REASON 1. EVERYONE IN A VILLAGE SHARES THE SAME OBJECTIVE

Many people have noted that a village is very similar to a family. Property really doesn't exist among family members (except on a formal basis), because generally speaking everyone in a family considers everything in a house as their collective possession. Even if the male parent bought a ceramic bowl, the bowl quickly becomes family property.

Why does this phenomenon occur?

Answer: everyone in a family shares the same objective -- the prosperity of each of the family members.

When multiple people share the same objective, working in teams is far more efficient than working separately. Rather than each member of a village needing to have their own hoe/shovel, they are able to survive better as a whole by sharing one.

To escape this family effect (on a small village scale), different members of a village have to have different objectives.

However, you can't control what objectives/reasons the players are playing. Some people play exclusively to grief. Most people play because they like seeing their lineages go for a long time. A large fraction don't care about lineages (particularly when you're male) and just want to leave some kind of legacy/positive impact on a village.

The easiest way I can imagine there being a sufficiently different objectives between village players was if there was more incentive for players to focus on their own line and not their cousin's line. In real life, you have brothers killing brothers (particularly among royalty to inherit something), among other things. The family is the smallest unit that everyone shares a common objective.

Ways players could be incentivized to focus on their own line, rather than their cousin's.

* Male players contribute to the lineage; two parents = babies.

* Players have increased likelihood of spawning as their own great-great-grandchild. In fact, what if that was the only way to avoid the area lock? The only way to get spawned back into the same village is if you ended up back in your own lineage (4+ generations in the future)?

* Automatic primogeniture. Property objects are given to the first-born son (pick a system) automatically when the previous owner dies. In the absence of a first-born son, give it to the nearest blood relative (like crowns are inherited).

Last edited by lychee (2019-05-10 14:33:57)

lychee · 2019-05-10 15:26:38

On why there isn't trade/property... continued.

REASON 2: INSUFFICIENT COMPETITION, DECREASING VALUE OF LAND

If we consider nature, animals are territorial because there are usually more animals than territory. Animals fight each other for limited territory, which contains resources. Winning a fight must leave the winner better off than before.

There are two features of OHOL that prevent this aspect of natural history from occurring:

+ + +

The first is that land is unlimited in OHOL. This is the opposite of the way most of the Earth has been through most of history -- where land is limited (and animals fight over territory/defend their territory). In fact, the original etymology of the word "property" only referred to land, and was not used to describe any other kind of material object.

On Earth, property (land) ownership historically had powerful rewards, in that so long as somebody owned land, they could guarantee the fitness of their lineage. Owning land was the holy grail of tenant fairmers and peasants. There was strong incentive to defend their property (land) against landless people, and everybody wanted land.

Notably, this really only works when you have both landed property owners, and homeless non-property owners.

In OHOL, land is infinite, but resources are finite, which is the reverse of what is needed to incentivize property ownership.

Since land is infinite, there's no reason to own property. Since local resources are finite in OHOL, the value of land (property) decreases with time, particularly when local resources are exhausted. This would be like if the real estate valuation of your house decreased every decade. In OHOL, land is the equivalent of a metaphorical block of melting ice. Given enough time, it becomes worthless. Why would somebody spend $1000 to buy a block of melting ice, when the benefit obtained by having one doesn't exceed the corresponding investment?

As long as this "infinite land with rapidly depleted resources" paradigm holds true, there will never be an incentive to hold landed property.

+ + +

The second reason why competition for land doesn't exist in OHOL is that there is an absence of surplus.

It might sound weird that I'm talking about insufficient competition and insufficient surplus in the same post, but let me explain.

People with discrete math might be familiar with the pigeonhole principle:

Consider a thought experiment where each hole (m) is a "person". If a person receives a pigeon, they are a poor person. If a person receives no pigeon, they starve and die. If a person receives >1 pigeon, they are rich.

The general current state of the OHOL is such that m > n. Life is hard. There's barely enough to survive. You're either poor or you're dead. There's no room for the rich, and anyone trying to be rich is viewed as a "griefer".

Surplus is required for specialization, trade, and lots of other features of modern human society. You can simulate animal society in the absence of surplus, but human culture is critically based on the presence of surplus.

When n >> m, you start to have rich people and poor people, and class differences can arise. Of course, there will always be the occasional dead person who has no pigeon, but generally speaking most people have to have a minimum level of sustenance before they're willing to tolerate some degree of inequality.

In OHOL (m < n), if you have a "rich" person hogging all the pigeons, you don't end up with a society with classes/inequality. Instead, you end up with a whole lot of dead people. A "rich" person isn't rich anymore when they're the only one left.

Last edited by lychee (2019-05-10 15:35:25)

lychee · 2019-05-11 01:45:45

So after writing the OP, later on I stumbled on some threads on how the game is coded (and I glanced at the github), and lots of the things suggested here probably aren't that feasible given how the game was initially designed.

Oh well! Dreams, nonetheless, right?

In either case, I can't help my brain wandering and thinking about the what ifs.... and I started thinking about how one might design a more true-to-life simulator, worrying a little less about trying to artificially produce "excitement" in the game.

I'm posting this here mostly for the lol's.

+ + +

My first line of thought was that to simulate reality better, 1 hour is a bit too short to cover 60 years. I can't figure out a decent way to fit seasons or day/night cycles into 1 hour. Even if you try to fudge and stretch the lines, most people would experience 1-3 cycles of seasons and then die, which is pretty short for a "lifetime".

So then my mind started wandering towards extending the time to one life to fit more content. I floated towards a 90 minute game to a 2 hour game to even a 3 hour game, but really it was starting to get untenable.

At that point I basically gave up on trying to fit a "life" on a single gaming session, and started considering how to do real-time yet over multiple days/weeks.

I figured that with ~180X acceleration, and using 4 month years and 15 day months, a 60-year life comes out to about 20-30 days.

Yay~ One Month One Life (lol)

The problem is that people won't play games constantly... but that's fine if we tweak human biology a bit, right? Instead of fantasy-humans sleeping on regular cycles, all humans like to have periods of hibernation and being insomniacs (most of the time hibernating I guess), so I guess these humans really like to sleep. XD

I checked a survey on google and most gamers play games 4-6 hours per week, which using the more conservative number comes out to 2% of the time. I kept wavering on this more, and then ultimately decided that it would be a bit silly if 98% of your player base is sleeping in beds all the time. In fact, most of all the space in a "settlement" would be beds with sleeping people, lol.

Then I floated towards the idea of scriptable play (kind of like those browser games where you log on to check something and set tasks for the next 8-24 hours for your character to do when you're offline). However, when you're online you override and take manual control. I later decided I didn't like that a whole lot either.

And then.......

A fun idea occurred to me.

What if everybody were tree ents and dryads.

A tree ent and dryad simulator!

When people log off they turn into trees.

And 200X time acceleration makes sense. If you slow it down, in the game-reality everyone is moving in super slow motion like you expect tree ents to!!!

And then you can make tree ents (the players) vs. evil human NPC ants that are buzzing around constantly deforesting your trees lol.

And then tree ent society and tree ent technology............... tree ent babies with tree ent moms and dads popping out all around.............

It takes 6 days (in game time) for a couple tree ents to have a simple conversation, hello, how are youuuuuuuu....................................

Last edited by lychee (2019-05-11 01:46:15)

lychee · 2019-05-11 18:02:21

This wikipedia page is excellent for filling in things on a tech tree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_ … inventions

+ + +

PROPOSAL NINE: ADOPT A NOOB

Players who really like teaching noobs could have an option on the login screen:

- "Check here if you're interested in teaching and parenting new players"

Players who check the option have increased likelihood of getting new/younger players (as defined by the total number of games played). It doesn't increase their overall birth rate -- just affects the type of players they get.

Why do this?

Some players just aren't interested in parenting or spending all their patience on teaching noobs from scratch. However, others love it. By increasing the likelihood that noobs are paired with nice moms, everyone comes out happier.

Last edited by lychee (2019-05-11 18:02:38)

lychee · 2019-05-11 20:44:19

PROPOSAL TEN: TUTORIAL TOWN

There should be a secret section of the tutorial where the player can stumble into an abandoned town.

Would allow players to sandbox better; learn how to use and interact things.

Tutorial should cover basic farming and wells.

Last edited by lychee (2019-05-11 20:44:36)

1%Spacebar · 2019-05-12 01:29:56

lychee wrote:

PROPOSAL TEN: TUTORIAL TOWN
There should be a secret section of the tutorial where the player can stumble into an abandoned town.
Would allow players to sandbox better; learn how to use and interact things.
Tutorial should cover basic farming and wells.

You might not know, but the tutorial is actually one of many structures, all lined up N/S. They're all the same thing, and it's on the same server as everyone else is playing. I've had the bell ring, once, and it's shown the current belltower was 6.6 million
tiles away.

Anyways, I think this would be hard to implement, since players spawn in a random one of these tutorial structures, and, if there was to be an entire town included, they'd have to be either a whole lot farther apart, or there would be multiple outside of them/players would have to go on a scavenger hunt to find the only town. It just doesn't seem that plausible.

I think the tutorial should cover farming and wells, though. It'd make it a lot better.

futurebird · 2019-05-12 01:41:32

lychee wrote:

In OHOL (m < n), if you have a "rich" person hogging all the pigeons, you don't end up with a society with classes/inequality. Instead, you end up with a whole lot of dead people. A "rich" person isn't rich anymore when they're the only one left.

This is why we need better storage. So we can build up the kind of surplus that lets a civilization be complex. Can you imagine if there were a famine in NYC if someone watered all the carrots? People may have food insecurity or worse nutrition. But, there is more food than anyone can hope to eat. It's not a critical issue, distribution is. That's only possible because it probably only takes a few thousand farmers scattered over the globe to feed the 8 million people in NYC. So we can work on other concerns... like mathematics for example.

It's not just food it's everything, all goods exist in abundance and the major cost is distribution which is another issue. But, to go back to the first cities you had huge stores of grain and fresh water, enough food for a few years, that's when cities really took off. So we need silos, and flour bins and machines that help was water more plants and ways to pump and store huge quantities of water.

Without that, we are just neolithic people and we will feed and help each other just to live and resent anyone who hogs anything because hogging resources now is literal murder.

lychee · 2019-05-12 23:40:34

@1%Spacebar Oh haha, I didn't know XD

@futurebird I'm actually not sure how much surplus OHOL ever is going to see. Jason seems pretty set on making starvation a threat at every stage of the game -- which essentially implies that there will likely won't be a large amount of steady surplus (and if there were -- I think Jason would call the game "too easy" and raise the difficulty somehow).

Not that absence of surplus this is a bad thing, of course -- maybe that's just the kind of game Jason wants. However, it explains why OHOL has neolithic/primitive social structures, and I don't really expect that to change very much no matter how advanced the technology tree gets.

EDITORIAL ONE: IMPRESSIONS ON VERSION 222 "COME TOGETHER"

Now that it's been a few days since languages and swords, and things have stabilized a bit, I think I'll drop my impressions after playing a bit.

So far, I like the idea of keeping people closer together -- and making people from different families clearly different from each other. It adds a lit bit more complexity to the game that I think is an overall positive. My main concerns (that many people have spoken about) regarding swords was that they would be used primarily as a griefer too (e.g. let's raid/war mass murder for fun!!!!!!!!!!!) -- rather than as a legitimate selfish tool for material benefit. The cooldown to the swords was a relief, although the "combat system" in OHOL still seems really immature.

I'm still not a huge fan of the "magic" objects in the game -- the property fences and swords that can be only used on outsiders.

And I'll probably keep thinking about alternate ways that the game could be adjusted so that Jason could get the same outcomes without "magical" items.

THERE'S STILL NOT A VERY STRONG INCENTIVE TO WALL YOUR TOWN/VILLAGE:

The main problem right now is that resources just disappear too fast. Even if you tried to build a 100 tile radius wall around your village, the nearby resources deplete so fast that it's kind of like building a wall around worthless land. I mean, who would build a wall around a chunk of the Sahara desert? There's nothing inherently valuable there.

Frankly land itself isn't that valuable in OHOL. People and natural resources (e.g. iron, water) are valuable, but locations are not inherently valuable.

As soon as you build a wall around something "valuable", it gets depleted, so there's really not a strong incentive to claim property ownership claims on land. Furthermore, the wall just ends up being a hassle. You have to travel around the wall to get things you need, so basically most of the time you're blocking yourself more than you're blocking outsiders, so it's kind of like "locking yourself in" in land that's inherently worthless.

STARVATION HAPPENS TOO QUICKLY:

I think(?) Jason's vision for the Swords update was that villages would decide that there's not enough of an essential resource -- food -- for example, and the starving village would be incentivized to pick up swords and raid the neighboring village for food.

Personally, I think the practical issues that prevent this from happening is that starvation just happens way too quickly. All crises happen too quickly. It takes a lot of energy and coordination to put together a raid, and a starving village just doesn't have the practical capacity for that. Most average players don't look very far into the future -- and when a food crisis hits, people panic and run around looking for food anywhere.

Additionally, the most common reason for a food crisis is simply mismanagement (source: me). For example, someone ate the last carrot or never planted any wheat. When this occurs, the first response that most people have is to run into the wild to fix whatever the mismanaged thing was (e.g. find a wild carrot, find some straw to reboot compost cycle). It takes just as much time to search for a stopgap in the wild as it does to smith a bunch of swords, convince everyone to attack the neighboring village all while the hunger meter is flashing and people dropping dead all around........... yeah.... that just doesn't happen.

Besides, even if the hypothetical raiding party is assembled, what do they even take once they've invaded the village? Pies? Iron (...it can't be iron because you need iron for swords... right?)? There's really nothing worthwhile to take, except for oil, but oil rigs aren't even found in villages to begin with (just steal some).

I just struggle to rationalize a non-griefer reason why swords might be used for something legitimate. As it stands, the only reason why somebody would use swords to attack another village is because they like the fun of killing (=griefing, except permitted by Jason)

THE MINIMAL FAMILY UNIT:

One topic I've been thinking about regarding property is the minimal family unit (MFU).

To me, I define the minimal family unit as the minimum number of people necessary to sustain a property over multiple generations.

Part of OHOL's problem is that the MFU is quite large. If it's just you and your son on a private property you've made -- you can kiss it goodbye because your line is dying out. Even if you have one girl, you can't really feel confident that the property will live on. The mortality rate is so high in this game -- only a fraction of people make it to old age, so there's at least a coin toss that no matter who you give it to, they'll die before handing it off.

In OHOL, a village can barely sustain itself for 48 hours.

A small tiny family branch... realistically doesn't sustain itself for more than 2-3 generations.

But herein lies the issue.

In order to have a private property project, you have to be able to develop a personal connection with your heir (or else they won't maintain it). It takes time to develop a personal relationship with your heir (even if they're interested to begin with), and it's probably only plausible to have that relationship with one person.

However, one person isn't enough to sustain a property line!

+ + +

RANDOM PROPOSAL ELEVEN: MAKE YOUR IMMEDIATE FAMILY STANDOUT ON THE UI:

To help players develop a closer relationship with their immediate family (Mom, Sister, Brother, Daughter, Son, Grandmother) -- these players should be highlighted on the UI. Label them or something.

It's pretty hard to mouseover everyone in the village and figure out who's your mom (or family), and since everyone looks pretty similar, it's easy to forget.

I want to be able to recognize my mom/children at first sight without needing to mouseover people. XD

I think if this occurred, I'd feel subjectively closer to these people (in the larger villages/towns, there's so many people walking around that it gets harder to distinguish between people).

+ + +

RANDOM PROPOSAL TWELVE: CHEAP HUTS

Every stereotypical picture of a village is that they have tons of little residential huts, lean-tos, tents, and teepees right? Food, water, shelter are the triad of survival -- and in real life it's important to prioritize shelter even if it's just a bunch of half-shaved branches. Of course -- in real life, people need places to sleep and and weather sucks (we don't have this in OHOL) -- but would be interesting if we tried to simulate this feature of primitive life better.

Shelter can be improvised out of almost anything IRL, so it should be a lot cheaper in OHOL.

This is a pretty radical proposal that employs this general idea:

1. Remove property fences because they're too "magical". Cheap Huts are intended to fulfill a similar purpose but be a lot more natural.

2. Nerf outdoor fires. They're not that effective for temperature anymore. Indoor fires would be the best way to keep babies warm.

3. Huts would be a 3x3 or 4x4 tile set that can be built really early in the game with very little resources, kind of like how property fences currently are.

4. Add food spoilage. Food spoils fast if outdoors, even if in bowls.

5. All huts have a "hearth" title. Fire will burn for a very long time on a hearth tile if lit with a firebrand.

6. Doors automatically/open close for the owner and immediate relatives (clicking is a hassle and a barrier to having doors in general)

7. Automatic inheritance of the "hut" to your oldest living child when you die. If you have no living relatives, the first person who walks into an unclaimed hut now owns it.

8. By default, only the owner and their immediate blood relatives (no cousins, uncles) can enter a hut.

9. Specific guests can be granted access to the hut by saying: "JOHN DOE CAN ENTER". (Note: make sure guests can't get locked inside; this is a fence exploit)

10. Huts can be destroyed by griefers/raiders with... idk an axe. They're not meant to be indestructible.

11. Huts can be upgraded over time. Perhaps your son might decide to change the walls to something sturdier, or make the hut bigger, add a bed, oven... eventually a television... however the cheapest hut has a fixed tile size (small: 3x3). Maybe can add attached property fence later (similar to current property fence), but that would be an upgrade and not a standalone thing. Hut-only objects would be interesting. Increased storage in huts would be nice.

12. Huts double as a Home Marker.

13. Sleeping on your bed, if you have one, can drastically reduce the rate that you dies. If you get yellow fever, or are injured, run to your bed. You have to stay on the bed and not move, and someone would have to come treat you -- but it would buy valuable time.

14. Add a ranking/scoring method for the most lavish hut and display pictures on the front page of the website as an incentive for improving your personal property and passing it on multiple generations.

15. You can only own one hut at a time.

16. Fertility for women is increased when inside a hut.

+ + +

RANDOM PROPOSAL THIRTEEN: SPOIL THE CHILDREN

When your children are cute and happy, it's natural to feel "warm" on the inside.

Let's make this literal.

When you do something nice for your immediate blood relatives (e.g. give a hat to a child), your temperature meter goes to the perfect middle for a number of seconds (20-30 seconds?). You can add something to the UI that makes it look glow-y and happy. This would be reciprocal so both the gift giver and gift receiver would feel this way.

You can only do this a certain number of times with each person (e.g. 3 times max? or maybe cooldown?), and never with the same object twice.

This would give a functional purpose to random gift items.

This suggestion still needs balancing.

Last edited by lychee (2019-05-13 00:24:00)

lychee · 2019-05-13 00:14:29

As an addendum to the hut idea:

Easy private property that is shared with the nuclear family would be /really useful for kids who start naked.

Sometimes I want to make myself a BP, and I go trap rabbits -- bring back a haul -- and then trap more... but by the time I get back, the rabbits I trapped earlier have already been taken by other people (since well... the whole village is naked, right?)

I know that I can probably take some needle+threadball and make a BP/clothes in the fields, but sometimes I feel like it's such a waste to leave the meat outside.

Would be nice to have a place to store your rabbits (e.g. your parent's house), if you're making multiple runs and don't want your stuff taken while you're gone.

Would also be very valuable for people who want to keep bows/knives/weapons in a safe place without hiding it in the trees.

The main thing is I think I think it should have critical benefits, like a better fire (and nerfed outdoor fires), doors are a hassle, and shouldn't be so easily griefable.

Well... you would probably have griefers who "steal from the village" and put stuff in their hut, but at least then everybody would know and probably lynch the griefer/break into the hut. I think it'd be worth it -- in the sense that I can sort of imagine this kind of drama occurring in primitive societies.

lychee · 2019-05-13 15:03:17

RANDOM PROPOSAL THIRTEEN: RIVERS/OCEANS IMPLEMENTATION SCHEME

Rivers/oceans have been proposed multiple times, and here I'll suggest a way it could be implemented.

Since OHOL uses a near-infinite map, it's really not possible to surround the map with water. There are two choices on how to implement oceans:

1) Make large "lakes" and place them on the map and call them "oceans".

2) Make lots of large continents on a near-infinite map.

Either one is probably fine, although having multiple continents might be cool. Wouldn't it be fun to make boats and try to sail out into the ocean? Is the world round? What was it like to be Christopher Columbus sailing off into the unknown?

I'm actually leaning towards the continents idea because it makes a finite map (discussed extensively in the above posts) which is important for creating complex social dynamics, yet the possibility of more land beyond the ocean remains consistent with a near-infinite server size and potential ability to scale with a large player base.

I still heavily favor the lopsided distribution of non-essential resources idea.

The implementation isn't even that hard. All you have to do is randomly generate a bunch of polygons on a sparse map such that individual polygons are fairly large, and there aren't too many polygons everywhere.

Combined with oceans, your people might run around your continent and eventually figure out: "Oh, there's not much oil here" and decide they might need to sail off into the sea.

Beside, off-shore oil rigs are a thing too, right?

In either case, when a resource is abundant, I think it's more reflective of reality when it's ridiculously abundant (yet sparse in other places). Here is an iron mine IRL:

They're enormous and stretch for miles. A single mine in Sweden -- theFalun Mine -- supplied as much as two third's of Europe's copper during the middle ages/renaissance. And this is generally true of most minerals -- Spanish silver from Latin America revolutionized European economy (with crazy inflation), with 60% of the world's silver supply coming from Potosi after the mines opened.

The lopsided distribution of resources like these were a strong motivating factor for the development of long-distance trade.

Now, as for rivers.

I know that Jason doesn't want to make unlimited water because he thinks that's boring -- so for now let's pretend you can't get fresh water from rivers. (Why not? Well... for now, magic).

Rivers can be simulated by generating random squiggles from lakes.

It's easiest to generate them if topography is present, but it's not strictly necessary. Any random line will be fine.

It would be cool if rivers are ~2 tiles thick, and players could not cross them without building bridges.

Even if rivers aren't used for fresh water, they would be valuable for:

- Industrial revolution was initially powered by watermills. Factories /had/ to be build on rivers.

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