Suggestion - Wild Roads

DestinyCall · 2019-10-08 20:20:35

How about trying something new to spice things up a bit - No rift + Periodic Eve Window + Procedurally generated roads.

Remove the rift as a way to force towns closer together and replace it with natural "highways" - procedurally generated roads that run long distances, allowing distant towns to connect together and find each other more quickly.

Every six hours, the Eve window opens for an hour or two, with new Eves seeded into the open map on an expanding spiral. The spiral could reset after a week or so to limit the spread.

Map wipe would be triggered by Apocolypse or server reset only. Map culling would occur on areas that were not viewed for extended time. Reset would NOT be triggered by loss of families during Eve drought. Instead, a single family would trigger a short Eve window (15 min) to allow the population to rebalance and redistibute naturally.

....

Ideally, this would limit the number of living families, by having Eves spawn for only a limited time period each day. But it should increase the diversity of active towns by opening up the world and allowing people to spread out as necessary. Meanwhile, the existence of pre-build roads would create natural landmarks, useful for navigation, and allow distant villages to connect with each other more easily.

Regarding the roads, I'd like to see long straight roads (more than 1,000 tiles). In fact, replacing fault lines with roads would be perfect. The roads could be interrupted by other naturally occuring objects, like trees and rabbit burrows, so players would need to "repair" these long roads in some spots. But the main body of the work would already be done.

Alternatively, the roads could generate in a partially or mostly "decayed" state, with many of the flat stones in position, but not yet set into the ground. In this case, it would be harder to travel long distances into uncharted territory, but easier to see if you are entering an inhabited area by looking at the state of the roads.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-10-08 21:11:10)

Joseph Stalin · 2019-10-08 21:46:38

i think at 0,0 there should be roads up and down as well as side to side, maybe 5k long, to create a central trading hub of sorts

DestinyCall · 2019-10-08 22:08:21

Yes, that would be perfect.

One aspect of the Rift that I genuinely like is that the rift edges are unique landscape features that allow you to orient yourself with the world in a meaningful way. It makes travelling long distances much more practical when you sort of know where you are relative to the rift box. A radiating central road network could do something similar for the open map.

jasonrohrer · 2019-10-08 22:47:18

Yeah, the wrap-around world....

I have thought about that (long ago), but it's a bit harder to code than it sounds, especially this late in the dev process.

Anyway, it wouldn't solve the "trapped" feeling that people complain about, but it would definitely feel less artificial.

jasonrohrer · 2019-10-08 22:48:02

And as for the OP suggestion.... wild roads.... well.... the world is supposed to be untouched when the arc starts. That's a premise of the game.

DestinyCall · 2019-10-08 22:49:50

I thought the premise of the game was post-apocolyptic?

The_Anabaptist · 2019-10-08 22:50:54

I'll offer another alternative. Wouldn't it be awesome if the game kept track of where people walked? After enough foot falls, the terrain would turn into 'hard pack' which prevented farming unless tilled in some fashion? After more footfalls, it could turn into 'trail' to designate where people actually walked and served as a suggestion of where to install flat stones, or cobblestone, or planks or whatever?

I would not like roads just being there before an eve showed up. That's just immersion breaking to me and it spoils one of my favorite activities, actual road building. Pretty soon, I would be labeled a maladjusted player for taking a pick axe to that highway and using the mats to make another one that mattered to me more.

The_Anabaptist

DestinyCall · 2019-10-08 23:47:54

Or these paths could be dirt "game trails" instead of stone pavers. Even in untouhed wilderness, there are still large animals wandering around and looking for food/water.

Alternatively, rivers could be the "roads" radiating out from 0,0 ... They are like natural "roads" which would block land-movement (foot travel or horse travel), but allow rapid travel using a boat or raft. Rivers could be crossed on foot by constructing a bridge.

But obviously, either option would require more coding and new content.

TitaniaDioxide · 2019-10-10 00:03:39

I really like this idea overall.

Jason, you tend to want descriptions of problems, rather than suggested solutions right? Let me give this a shot with what I think this feature request is coming from.

From what I understand, you had several goals for the rift - to encourage interaction with each other, and to experiment with scarcity being the two main reasons that I've seen. There are problems with each of these in this implementation (and also some problems that exist with them in the pre-rift implementation.

Problem: The scarcity in the rift feels artificial. There's more world out there, we just can't reach it, and we as players don't like being told that there's a place we can't go.

Related problem: The rift gives us the means to interact with other families, but not the motivation to do so - yeah, we could go to another town and help them out, but why bother? It's all going to be gone in two days anyway because the arcs are so short.

Problem: The arcs are short (at least in part because) a decent number of players want the early game experience, which isn't possible in the rift after the first day because the wilderness is always touched, and nothing regenerates or changes without a big reset.

On the old implementation side, I see the following issues.

Problem: There was no scarcity. You could just keep running and you'd find an area where no one else had touched to make a new town.

Problem: We had the motivation to keep towns going (as shown by the several towns that managed to last a couple weeks), but there was no way to find existing towns. This meant that everything was early game, and we had trouble getting to the top of the tech tree or interacting with each other.

It feels like there should be a way to marry those two states. A hard rift is a problem because it constrains us too much. An infinite map is a problem because it doesn't constrain us at all. The "Wild Roads" suggestion seems (to me - I don't know the engine or how much work it would take) like a good way to give us a "soft" rift. Yeah, there's a big wide wilderness out there, and if you want the early game experience, you can go there, or be planted there as an Eve, but the central hub is where the big cities are going to end up - that gives us the means to interact with each other, and the fact that we aren't trapped in a box will reinvigorate the motivation to interact (and decrease the number of murders for attempted resets). Those areas would be consistently visited, and over time the resources around them will get depleted (natural rather than artificial scarcity). You could try to found a new town far away where there are resources, but it probably won't survive long, so that gives us a reason for apocalypse when things get bad for everyone.

Especially if there's a modified resetting Eve spiral (making it more likely that the new center goes closer to 0,0 than further from it), it seems like this would keep us somewhat contained while still allowing for multiple play styles and letting us feel freed rather than caged.

Dogwolf12 · 2019-10-10 06:25:07

This ^

I love Eveing and early game. I also love established towns. The 'game trails' or 'rivers' idea allows it to still feel 'wild' per se but also allow more interactions. IMO, towns don't really have much to do with each other - you either help each other (which has the same feel as being born into one family) or periodically engage in shift-right-click fests. There is no in-between. This would help set the scene for interaction when it can be improved.

seth · 2019-10-11 00:18:36

One of the objectives of the rift to my knowledge is to run up against the possibility of resources all extinguishing, which we haven't even run up against with borders (well, not since the dystopian beginning of the rift). Remove the rift, we'll never get to the point where resource usage matters.

...So we'll basically live in harmony with our societies current trajectory: Pretending that infinite growth in a planet with limited resources is possible. Probably don't need a game to tell ya what happens over the long term, but it would be amazing if that would happen over the course of a week or two!

Saolin · 2019-10-12 03:26:26

With the current combat mechanics and state of war swords, I think if we went back to the eve spawning style of the "Come Together" update on an infinite map, it could potentially solve all the issues the rift attempts to address. All Eves could spawn close to the center, bringing players together, and this is where the major towns would pop up. Scarcity would organically exist as the surrounding areas were combed for resources.

To work in the curse mechanics, a player could need to be born within X number of tiles of another player to spawn normally, otherwise they'd be sent to Donkey Town. A limiting factor could exist outside a certain range from the center to prevent towns from moving out too far (otherwise we'd likely end up with a center filled with mostly decrepit ruins while towns got further and further apart), such as a lack of well sites. Small outposts could exist for a short time outside this region for the purpose of gathering resources, living off the water from ponds until it ran too low to be feasible.

The first paragraph is the meat of the idea. The second paragraph is the most obvious solution to me to encourage players to stay towards the center. A state of persistence and longevity would exist towards the center while a state of un-tamed wilderness would exist at the edges of the explored map, allowing players free to choose or embrace their starting circumstances... until society eventually collapsed due to a gradually escalating strain on increasingly distant resource-gathering outposts.

Last edited by Saolin (2019-10-12 03:37:49)

Spoonwood · 2019-10-12 10:53:33

jasonrohrer wrote:

And as for the OP suggestion.... wild roads.... well.... the world is supposed to be untouched when the arc starts. That's a premise of the game.

This makes for a bizarre thing to say. The game at one point had Eve respawning. Later it had stone walls that would never decay. Later also roads wouldn't decay. Oh... and the arc implementation came after that.

Jason, OTHER people play your game, and have a different concept of it than you. The game merely consists of a bunch of code running. It's not your ideas. It's a computer program that people get to interpret as they choose. It's not wise to tell people about the game's 'premises', because it ignores that people have different and valid interpretations than you.

CatX · 2019-10-12 13:33:47

jasonrohrer wrote:

And as for the OP suggestion.... wild roads.... well.... the world is supposed to be untouched when the arc starts. That's a premise of the game.

That's why there have been suggestions that the wild roads could be rivers, or paths made by animals.

Or roads from earlier iterations. If we could mine for flat rocks, road building would be simpler.

DestinyCall · 2019-10-12 14:57:12

Spoonwood wrote:

It's a computer program that people get to interpret as they choose. It's not wise to tell people about the game's 'premises', because it ignores that people have different and valid interpretations than you.

Ah, but that would imply that our interpretations of the game's premise are equally valid. I don't think he would agree with that view.

I'll keep trying, but I ran out of hope a while ago.

CatX · 2019-10-12 16:19:14

DestinyCall wrote:

Alternatively, rivers could be the "roads" radiating out from 0,0 ... They are like natural "roads" which would block land-movement (foot travel or horse travel), but allow rapid travel using a boat or raft. Rivers could be crossed on foot by constructing a bridge.

How about... [warning, incoming suggestion]

Shallow Rivers.

You can walk up or down (or cross) a shallow river, but your speed is reduced by half.

Babies can't enter shallow rivers.

A cart without wheels can be used as a boat to travel the shallow river quickly. The animation of the moving person shows the shaft of the cart being used as an oar/stick to push the cart along.

DestinyCall · 2019-11-16 18:13:14

This feels like a good moment to bring up the idea of naturally generated trails or rivers. They could help connect towns together, improve navigation, and make traveling long distances without a horse more viable.

Kinrany · 2019-11-16 20:56:45

Roads are interesting because they change the topology. Without roads all activity is shaped as roughly circular blobs around points of interest and straight lines between them.

Not artificial roads though: those tend to copy the already existing paths. But natural roads would encourage building stuff around them. You could say that the space around a road is compressed: everything is closer if measured by the time spent travelling.

Rivers are slightly more interesting in that they have directions.

kittykatthegreat · 2019-11-17 03:54:01

Is there a mark from where someone is born and where they die? If so, possibly use a path finder from location A (birth) to location B (death). after x amount of players have taken this "path" create dirt road.

kittykatthegreat · 2019-11-17 04:04:46

Maybe rivers could be done like this, start of a river from every 10 springs out (maybe more), use path finders to wind and join, they die out at x amount of distance and volume (for rivers that join). As far as crossing them it could take a joint effort of supply dropping into a bridge.

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#1 2019-10-08 20:20:35

Suggestion - Wild Roads

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Re: Suggestion - Wild Roads

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Re: Suggestion - Wild Roads

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