What if we force Eve to get real...

jasonrohrer · 2019-05-15 19:10:18

I've lived a few lives in the game over the past few days, and I'm always looking for other villages, but they are still very hard to find. I find myself wandering aimlessly, and then lucking out every once in a while to find a village. Actually, I've only lucked out that way once. The other time I found a village, it was through a bell ringing. And it was still really far away (1K +).

When I walk out of my village, there are perfectly hospitable places right nearby at other spring heads, but many of them were clearly abandoned right away by the Eve that was put there (she walked away, died, or whatever). And I suppose that there's a tendency for a "good Eve" to walk for a while to find the perfect spot, thus taking her far away from existing civs.

With the current way that Eve spots are chosen, we let a spring cool down for one hour before putting another Eve there. This contributes to the Eve grid "walking" as the spawn spots in the middle all are on cooldown, even if no Eve is there. Thus, civs get further apart. And with 900+ Eves a day, there's a lot of cool-down and grid migration going on.

Furthermore, there are spring heads everywhere (my estimate is that there are 4,900,000,000,000,000 spring heads on the map, or 4.9 quadrillion). So there's no contention for long-term water, and a failed bootstrapping really doesn't matter.

So what if we forced Eve to step up to a real challenge. 900 Eves per day indeed....

What if the only spring head on the map was where Eve spawned, and as soon as her line died out, it vanished if it wasn't improved into a well. This would allow us to keep placing Eves right around the civilization core (along with new spring heads), and force them to deal with what they're handed long-term. Yes, they would have to migrate a bit to bootstrap, but always with the intention of returning to their spring head (it's marked with a home marker, after all). If they don't build that well in the first generation, they'd have to tell their offspring where the spring is.

Thus, the only thing that would block an Eve from spawning in a given area would be an Eve run in progress or a civ that got to the shallow well phase (a civ that's alive or dead).

Eves would be very densely packed around the civ core, and they would keep trying in each spot until someone succeeded in bootstrapping there.

If you're in a town and you've never had neighbors to the north before, your gonna have them eventually.

This would also allow spring heads to move a bit father apart (because you don't ever need to walk out searching for them... you know there aren't any other ones). Having them as close as they are hasn't really helped us to have closer neighbors.

And if you mess up, and fail to get the next water tech in time, you would have to appeal to the neighbors for help, which is good.

Civ would still walk over time, but only as real civs (live or dead) became densely packed in the grid, so it would be a slow walk. Eves could scavenge for dead civs too.

There are obviously some risks here. Walking endlessly into greener pastures (current grid walk, and old eve sprial) is guaranteed to be safe in terms of enough wild resources to bootstrap.

Could we imagine a situation where 10 or 20 eve runs in progress are all destined to fail because wild resources have been stripped bare? It's alright if most of them fail. It's a disaster if all of them fail.

Joseph Stalin · 2019-05-15 19:22:00

ok, eve should be difficult. people should be unable to eve if they have slash died too much though.

wio · 2019-05-15 19:35:17

I would rather more effort be spent on making late game more challenging than making early game more difficult.

Currently the late game is really boring, because it's pretty safe. It would be preferable if there was an actionable challenge. For example, resource depletion as an inevitable unavoidable thing is not an actionable challenge. Having a next tier of tools in order to refine that resource from new sources or in a less wasteful way is actionable.

I would like there to be some downside to dense populations. In reality you will have problems with sanitation, sickness, and pollution. The only aspect of this that we have is pollution, where there is nowhere to put something down because people leave crap lying around.

paulof · 2019-05-15 19:39:07

Forgive me, but I would like to suggest another solution.What if we had easier ways to build roads?

it can be hard to find towns and its kind unnatural to force eves to have a behave. But it could be easy to find towns if we could construct longer roads in a lifetime, then it would be easy to find the roads, then find the cities and to connect towns. Once you find a town it is hard to get back and to teach people from your original town to get in there. that would be solved too.

futurebird · 2019-05-15 19:40:17

Eve camps don't do well in picked over areas. You need wild food to keep you and your kids alive until you can get a farm. Right now if you are Eve and the area is picked over you migrate if you want to have a good camp. And migrating is fun. I was just writing about it.

http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=6461

I like that over time it will become apparent that there are cities and older civs in one direction and wilds in the other. There isn't much point in staying in a bad spot... but choosing between migrating towards civilization or away from it could be interesting.

futurebird · 2019-05-15 19:42:51

paulof wrote:

Forgive me, but I would like to suggest another solution.What if we had easier ways to build roads?
it can be hard to find towns and its kind unnatural to force eves to have a behave. But it could be easy to find towns if we could construct longer roads in a lifetime, then it would be easy to find the roads, then find the cities and to connect towns. Once you find a town it is hard to get back and to teach people from your original town to get in there. that would be solved too.

A simple change that would make road building a little easier is this one:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues/278

Dodge · 2019-05-15 19:47:00

I like the idea of limiting the number of Eve's this should make villages closer.

About the springheads, what if they were placed on purpose next to living villages?

Currently the eve spawn is a straight diagonal but what if it was more like this :

So a few villages are close but not too many to still have space.

lychee · 2019-05-15 19:48:27

I actually share the opinion that difficulty should be added to the late game.

I agree that the early game is difficult enough already — I thought in the last thread you showed that out of ~9000 eve spawns, only 14 villages remained? Isn’t that a sign that the difficulty is plenty enough already for the early game?

Personally, I would like to see more challenges for large settlements — random events maybe? Sudden appearance of an evil velociraptor? Settlement catches on fire? The large towns get pretty boring so it’d be nice to see something new. XD

Glad to see you still energetic with the ideas! I know this week has been hard but stay strong and I look forward to whatever you come up with!

Buggy · 2019-05-15 19:49:19

paulof wrote:

Forgive me, but I would like to suggest another solution.What if we had easier ways to build roads?
it can be hard to find towns and its kind unnatural to force eves to have a behave. But it could be easy to find towns if we could construct longer roads in a lifetime, then it would be easy to find the roads, then find the cities and to connect towns. Once you find a town it is hard to get back and to teach people from your original town to get in there. that would be solved too.

Yes this ^ More flatties on the map (or a way to make flat rocks from the big rocks) and hitting the stakes the first time gives floor option. Those changes could easily make roads more viable. Or as suggested before a way to make dirt paths (which decay) that you can just lay flat stones on to make more permanent roads.

Last edited by Buggy (2019-05-15 19:49:39)

Dantox · 2019-05-15 19:50:11

If you want to spawn-lock the location when an Eve spawns then you would need to tweak the biomes where a spring-head can appear in since not any biome can support an eve camp long enough before this one can make progress (a good example would be branches, wild food or ponds, pheraps making the spring head like a super-pond before it dries out to become a deep well to fix the no water problem in say a mountain biome?) the principal reason why eves look for the perfect spot is that most of the biomes arent suitable for a camp so spawn-locking eves are going to just make eveing more tedious rather than challenging. If you make that changes as the game is right now most villages would wander off and try to co-exist with another village until one gets sick of the other and rushes the arms race to swords

jasonrohrer · 2019-05-15 19:50:24

Dodge, that example is operating in three dimensions...

In two dimensions, we can't spiral into new territory without the spiral growing in radius.

futurebird · 2019-05-15 19:54:54

It could zig zag on an diagonal, or use a creeping polar function that is an overlapping spiral (like a flattened spring. )

wio · 2019-05-15 19:55:32

Rather than littering the map with flat rocks, I would rather there be quarries that you can mine a lot of stone from. Then let people make gravel and perhaps latter on cement or tar.

Amon · 2019-05-15 19:57:03

If old resources are gone, at least some, like all natural plants and tule reeds should be refreshed on an hour or two hour basis to keep having a location viable?

Dodge · 2019-05-15 19:57:29

jasonrohrer wrote:

Dodge, that example is operating in three dimensions...
In two dimensions, we can't spiral into new territory without the spiral growing in radius.

I was thinking more that the straight line would have a bunch of satellite eve spawn around it, so when one eve spawn on the line there are a bunch of eves close to her on the same x axis.

Like this:

futurebird · 2019-05-15 19:58:08

I think forcing Eve to use the spring she is given, go to a town or die... would lead to a lot of Eve's just standing there dieing because the spot isn't good enough. Looking for a spot and migrating is part of the fun of the early game IMO.

Dodge · 2019-05-15 20:02:28

Or it could be a delimited area like this:

And once the area had over x numbers of eves spawned in, another area is created 500 tiles or more North,South,East, or West of the old area.

Last edited by Dodge (2019-05-15 20:03:09)

Buggy · 2019-05-15 20:08:45

I would rather eve be forced to get real by limiting the number of eves one person can do. Making it a special experience to start your own eve chain that you don't want to waste. Often I have been child to an eve and they just wander their whole life looking for a perfect spot or just kill themselves because it will be too hard to make a camp where they started. People who use /die to eve know they can just reroll for a better eve spawn instead of having to wander around looking for a good spot. I think this spring suggestion may make this problem worse.

paulof · 2019-05-15 20:09:31

Buggy wrote:

Or as suggested before a way to make dirt paths (which decay) that you can just lay flat stones on to make more permanent roads.

I like that. i also can think of something like in the Hansel and Gretel tale. We could make a road of leafs or some specific new object to mark a path (which decay) and people can't mess with it. But now i think eves would just find these paths and go live in a big town

Last edited by paulof (2019-05-15 20:11:06)

Dodge · 2019-05-15 20:21:59

Instead of being a straight line that goes to infinity it could be "boxes" of spawn area going more slowly into infinity.

With a setting like this, you would find dead villages and other civilisations almost guaranteed:

And there would be enough untouched space between the areas for ressources, but interaction between villages would also be another way to get these ressources.

Last edited by Dodge (2019-05-15 20:23:36)

Buggy · 2019-05-15 20:28:01

Also I don't understand how making early game harder will lead to towns being closer together? If every eve had everything they needed they could be very close together. While if most towns fail then towns get further and further apart, because between you and the last eve that was able to make a town there are 40 failed eves.

pein · 2019-05-15 20:33:55

bad maps are bad and if you force people to bad maps they quit or have a bad experience

Tarr · 2019-05-15 20:36:43

There are still unlivable springs in the game which means anytime Eve would spawn and it's not good you would kill yourself and try to get your spring spawn to be somewhere livable. Basically Eve lives would be sids on steroids as currently you need a specific setup for a town to be able to flourish in the first place. We have two biomes in game that basically do all the early stuff (grasslands for fire/rope/soil) and the swamp (has all the early water/firewood/clay/reeds). Without these two biomes you will basically fail every single Eve start which means if your spring spawns anywhere other than one of these biomes (with the other close) you would kill yourself instead of try to move and adapt.

I've personally spawned in:

-An arctic that didn't even have a spring
-A grassland that was a tiny patch surrounded by arctic tiles
-A badlands/desert combination where the spring spawned on a desert tile
-Savannah/jungle combo.

None of these places were livable in the current meta so it was either walk somewhere else to live or die. The game can and will deal you a bunch of unplayable (or well unlivable) biome choices with the spring mechanic and I don't think players will try to rise to the challenge when suicide nets you a fresh restart.

If you want the players to play the hand their dealt you can't deal them a terrible hand and make folding so easy. This is the easy choice. As people have suggested making an Eve token system based off something means people would try their hardest to survive if there was something at stakes. However, this still means you have the issue of terrible spawns and good spawns which means even the most skillful Eve will die to a terrible spot either due to bad biome mixes or players just refusing to stay with an Eve.

The hard choice is to make more biomes actually livable. Putting in the work to make it so places other than the two meta choices are at least somewhat livable. This means whenever a spring spawns somewhere the Eve has an actual chance to thrive instead of handing out unwinnable situations 90% of the time and telling the players to prove you wrong. Resource bleed (things having a main and secondary biome spawn), new clothing options (something that makes hot biomes livable just like we have clothes to make cold biomes easier), or some other idea.

TL;DR: Either biomes need work to make "unwinnable" springs usable or Eves need a token system to force Eves to play in these unwinnable situations without killing themselves.

Last edited by Tarr (2019-05-15 20:52:15)

Greep · 2019-05-15 20:39:44

(not everyone) Guys gotta read the whole post instead of just the title There would be only one well per eve and it would vanish on failure. This would make eves respawn over the failed eve spot rather than further away.

You're gonna have a lot of Eve suicides if they're forced to settle on their origin spot, though. I think two things would have to go with this: Buffing the wells as well as hard limiting number of eves on a server.

Edit: Yeah actually this would be pretty disastrous: Unwinnable spots would end up being played over and over due to the spawning algorithm you want, and you could actually get a week where nobody can play at all. So you'd actually have to make Eveing quite easy if going this route.

Last edited by Greep (2019-05-15 20:46:16)

futurebird · 2019-05-15 20:45:52

I know you didn't do this, Jason, but it almost feels like you read this post and said "how can I STOP that from happening?"

http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=6461

Setting out to find a great spot, scouting, migrating as a family are great parts of the game as it is now and with this it would be gone unless you are looking to go to an existing town.

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#1 2019-05-15 19:10:18

What if we force Eve to get real...

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