Why so distant? - about game difficulty

fug · 2020-06-22 15:51:01

Arcurus wrote:

was thinking about how it would be if we could create offspring villages with different races:
like if you get a baby there is a 20% chance that the baby gets the race of the closest biome
then one eve could in theory create all the races for all the biomes....

Babies used to have a 10% chance of spawning as a different skin tone than their mother which was removed because we can't have nice things Instead, now we get villages where two different colored families get stuck with one female model per generation (ginger/black.) Shit is whak.

DestinyCall · 2020-06-22 15:57:51

Coconut Fruit wrote:

DestinyCall wrote:
More successful, longer-lived families who ARE doing a good job of survival are being killed off by the demise of their less successful neighbors.
Families who are doing a good job also help their less successful neighbors, that's the key to survive really long time. Helping other families is a good thing, isn't it? It gives us more things to do, it makes this game harder, and I like it.
Tho, it's hard with this big amount of newbies, and also we can't do much against Bobo if he manages to become a leader...

I don't know about you, but I have a tough enough time keeping track of all my kids. Are you really asking me to make sure that the neighbors are making enough yum foods too?

Villas · 2020-06-22 16:14:05

I loved the islands and the locomotive ideas, I also remember asking for road-maker machine long ago, at least a way to turn big rocks into a lot of flat rocks. Even though, a 2.5k road or even worse a 5k road would be exhaustive, even to walk on it.

Letting your own family dies doesn’t seem plausible for me, they are my family, so my duty is to make sure they will last long, that my grandchildren will have a good life. If I need to travel 30 years for that, welp those are the hazards of the profession.

The ideal solution would be use cars and planes, but people steal them very quickly (to grief or to see how it works and then you run out of kerosene kilometers away). Although villages are naturally creating a bank culture, where they have a mini bank to keep the engine, kerosene and even a horse safe for using only when necessary, far from the griefer and curious hands. I think we need that, a bank where only the leader have access, only the leader (with a minimum of followers) can make the bank (like a leader gate), and then they could store the KEYS of the plane/car there and each plane/car would work with only its respective keys (and I why not apply it to engines, so people could only remove engines with the right key). That way people wouldn’t be able to steal the plane and we could use it to trade with far towns. The current property gate has a flaw, for example I have inherited the property gate of the Diesel engine as a baby, and I wasn’t even the leader. For that we would need a way to decrease griefers gene score and some make alerts when someone turn on the plane/car, so we would know if they are stealing it and curse them if we want to. That isn’t the coolest idea, but I think that is the easiest one to implement without making a lot of tests (like in the Rift time).

TLTR: Make cars and planes work with their unique keys; make a place where only the leader can open the gate to call it a bank and keep the keys there; Alert everyone nearby when someone starts the plane/car; Decrease the gene score of griefers when they are cursed.

Arcurus · 2020-06-22 16:20:09

Villas wrote:

TLTR: Make cars and planes work with their unique keys; make a place where only the leader can open the gate to call it a bank and keep the keys there; Alert everyone nearby when someone starts the plane/car; Decrease the gene score of griefers when they are cursed.

being able to create more flat stones would ne nice.

with the cars, i guess it would be possible to apply ownership like gates have on cars and engines...

Twisted · 2020-06-22 16:39:12

The problem is IMO iron. You can only get iron from the first homeland you make, which means two things:

1) If your family settles in a suboptimal place it's as good as dead which moves the spawning further west.

2) You can't build outposts of any kind to make the distance less jarring by building towns between primary homelands.

The iron revamp introduced so many issues to the game without really adding anything interesting. It was supposed to make iron valuable and precious but it kind of did the opposite - every new family creates more iron, and families die more often because surviving is more difficult, which means surviving families get to scavenge iron from dead families.

Mr.XIX · 2020-06-22 16:40:55

DestinyCall wrote:

Mr.XIX wrote:
@DestinyCall I don't know where you got that statement from. I say that the key to survival is for towns to be near each other.
You said that having close neighbors is the key to survival, but you also said this:
Mr.XIX wrote:
When people stop traveling 2k+ to bring kerosene or rubber, the towns die out quicker and will rejoin the other families at the eve-spawns.
Which implies that if your town is too far from other towns, you should just let it die.
People are complaining about the absurd distances in the game right now because we need close neighbors, but as soon as one of the three tribes dies out for whatever reason, the new Eves are spawning thousands of tiles away. More successful, longer-lived families who ARE doing a good job of survival are being killed off by the demise of their less successful neighbors. This is creating a bizarre situation where the "best" option for older towns is to just give up and die.
I am not a fan of this game-play model. The rapid cycling makes everything feel very pointless and futile. The reward for surviving a long time is being all alone and dragging everyone else down because they can't trade with you.

I indeed said both, and it indeed implies that if your town is too far from other towns, you should let it die. This does not specifically imply old towns, as well as newly founded towns from eves that traveled even more west to settle there. In this case, both the new, and old town should die.

The new eves don't spawn "thousands of tiles away" They spawn west of the most western town.

When a neighbour dies out. You should fix the village and let a new member move in.
Don't raid it and make your local area unlivable. That is what truly kills your town.
This is why eves travel west and the new eve spawn gets pushed even further.

Last edited by Mr.XIX (2020-06-22 16:42:26)

fug · 2020-06-22 17:01:36

Twisted wrote:

The problem is IMO iron. You can only get iron from the first homeland you make, which means two things:
1) If your family settles in a suboptimal place it's as good as dead which moves the spawning further west.
2) You can't build outposts of any kind to make the distance less jarring by building towns between primary homelands.

The iron revamp introduced so many issues to the game without really adding anything interesting. It was supposed to make iron valuable and precious but it kind of did the opposite - every new family creates more iron, and families die more often because surviving is more difficult, which means surviving families get to scavenge iron from dead families.

I actually tried something like this today. I moved the ginger lineage right next to the tans and our only source of iron was one of their veins. Right now things aren't looking very good but I'm going to at least spend a few hours trying to make the place somewhat livable.

Arcurus · 2020-06-22 17:06:01

Twisted wrote:

The iron revamp introduced so many issues to the game without really adding anything interesting. It was supposed to make iron valuable and precious but it kind of did the opposite - every new family creates more iron, and families die more often because surviving is more difficult, which means surviving families get to scavenge iron from dead families.

Yea iron rework would be great.

Was thinking about how it would be to make iron ore heavy like engine is and extend heavy also to carts.

So if you put one iron in your cart the movement speed is 50% if you put two in its 33% three 25%....

Rail carts would not be slowed down.

Mines would be by default usable again.

Arcurus · 2020-06-22 17:36:42

to the eve spawn, what about the following:

Eve spawn is rotated during one day: first they spawn west (of the most far west homeland), then north, then east, then south (end of the day)

Eves are either placed on the next not dry spring, or get a pointer to it.

Last edited by Arcurus (2020-06-22 17:37:31)

Laskara · 2020-06-23 01:36:07

DestinyCall wrote:

We should have an infinitely renewable map, instead of an infinitely large map. Heavy exploitation would deplete all the local wild resources, but if humans are gone for long enough, stuff starts to bounce back.
We would not need to death march constantly to escape the inexorable path of devastation that we leave in our wake. We could remain in the same general area by managing the available resources wisely. Wild spots could eventually returned to an untouched state over time, while areas close to civilization would take longer to recover.
It would be possible to live in the same location for a long time, as long as you took care to not wipe out all your nature reserves.

I think this is probably the fastest fix for this problem and is the most reflective of real life

Zerghaikn · 2020-06-23 08:37:30

Twisted wrote:

The problem is IMO iron. You can only get iron from the first homeland you make, which means two things:
1) If your family settles in a suboptimal place it's as good as dead which moves the spawning further west.
2) You can't build outposts of any kind to make the distance less jarring by building towns between primary homelands.

The iron revamp introduced so many issues to the game without really adding anything interesting. It was supposed to make iron valuable and precious but it kind of did the opposite - every new family creates more iron, and families die more often because surviving is more difficult, which means surviving families get to scavenge iron from dead families.

Maybe we could something to turn bear caves into exhaustible iron mines? I think a risk/reward system would be good for "unlimited iron", but the bears are too easy for well-developed towns, so there would have to be balancing there.

Last edited by Zerghaikn (2020-06-23 08:37:46)

Gogo · 2020-06-23 23:15:38

It happens again. White lives 2-3k away from others.

What if... a leader can arrange a voting? 'Your leader Sylvia Knox propose family migration'. You choose by typing /yes or /no (can slash be use like this?) or by commands 'I want/don't want to migrate'.

If everyone would choose yes, then family well is abandoned and we can pick another spot. It can be used after reaching some generation.

Last edited by Gogo (2020-06-23 23:20:22)

fug · 2020-06-24 00:36:02

Gogo wrote:

It happens again. White lives 2-3k away from others.
What if... a leader can arrange a voting? 'Your leader Sylvia Knox propose family migration'. You choose by typing /yes or /no (can slash be use like this?) or by commands 'I want/don't want to migrate'.
If everyone would choose yes, then family well is abandoned and we can pick another spot. It can be used after reaching some generation.

Yeah, lets move where we can't have iron unless our neighbors or a bunch of failed Eves existed around the spot previously. Iron really should be loosened up because at the end of the day we're still not using diesel picks which was Jason's goal. Iron would be so exhausted you'd be forced to use kerosene to get it and instead we're just looking all the failed Eves of the day to get the stuff instead of reaching that point.

DestinyCall · 2020-06-24 00:55:42

Gogo wrote:

It happens again. White lives 2-3k away from others..

At least it was just the vanillas. When they are missing, no one else really suffers that much.

Gogo · 2020-06-25 00:20:24

JonySky wrote:

Gogo wrote:
JonySky wrote:
but ... OHOL is a sandbox? or is it not?
If sandbox can't be good, I prefer smaller but better.
explain to me why a sandbox is not good?

They can be pretty dull, too big to have decent content. They depend mostly on nice views, good graphics.

jasonrohrer · 2020-06-25 02:17:22

A few things:

1. The big solutions, of totally revamping the game with oceans or whatever, don't address the actual problem we're experiencing now. Why this problem now? It's because:

A) Eve jumps to the West of the western-most homeland when she spawns (a relatively new thing).

B) There are "forced" Eve spawns when the existing towns get too old, meaning a certain number of Eves per day (a less new thing, but still new-ish).

Remove either of these things (which I can do right now, because they're both live server settings) and the problem goes away. But then the other problems crop up (either towns get old and stale OR Eves spawn in stripped-bare areas, or both...).

I will now push the ForceEveAfterGenerationNumber from 40 up to.... 100. That will be a new Eve every 23 hours, instead of every 9 hours. Which should mean that we move West at roughly 1/2 the current speed. Towns will be a bit more stale, but there will still be at least one new town every day.

2. The notion that a family can't migrate, because they can't have an iron mine in a different location, is false, at least for a high-tech family that has an engine. They can plop an engine down on any muddy iron vein (essentially, any vein not right in an existing homeland) and mine away. In fact, they can get even closer than that, because the engine can be installed on any sunken iron vein too. They can then dig a new well in that area. So, one woman with a horse cart and an engine can start a thriving village anywhere, as close as she wants to be to whatever family she wants to be near. What a family cannot do is generate more "free" iron in a different location.

But even if they don't have an engine to migrate their iron mine, if they're moving to be near another town, that town has iron, right? So dig a well nearby, and start having babies there, and then get iron from that town.

My guess is that people don't migrate simply because it's a complicated trans-generational project and hard to pull off---like herding cats. Much easier to just stay put and eat what we have left until we die out in a few generations.

jasonrohrer · 2020-06-25 02:28:39

The change, reducing the frequency of forced Eve spawn due to generational staleness, is live.

Gogo · 2020-06-25 04:53:49

Thank you Jason for trying to balancing it out and claryfing about migration.

DestinyCall · 2020-06-25 05:36:13

jasonrohrer wrote:

My guess is that people don't migrate simply because it's a complicated trans-generational project and hard to pull off---like herding cats. Much easier to just stay put and eat what we have left until we die out in a few generations.

My guess is that people don't migrate because it isn't fun.

JackTreehorn · 2020-06-25 06:48:03

Why would you migrate?
Pros
- You get an engine and whatever else you bring
- You might get more generations then you would have normally.

Cons
- You get less food from everything you eat, with starting villages not having as many options for Yum this becomes a big problem.
- You have to find and burn kerosene to get iron
- You have to start building again from scratch
- You have to risk your village in order to succeed in making a new one.

If you just wait for your town to die and a new eve spawn you get
-Caught up to the other families without the 20 minute + walk
-Plenty of iron
-Food is filling again.

The only reason I would travel to meet up with those far off families would be to deliver engines, radios and maybe bottles to fill up the horse cart or car.

Last edited by JackTreehorn (2020-06-26 04:21:05)

Gogo · 2020-06-25 07:46:02

JackTreehorn wrote:

If you just wait for your town to die and a new eve spawn you get

Last family members should be punished for letting family die out, by lowering their gene score.

Arcurus · 2020-06-25 08:53:09

jasonrohrer wrote:

A few things:
1. The big solutions, of totally revamping the game with oceans or whatever, don't address the actual problem we're experiencing now. Why this problem now? It's because:
...
My guess is that people don't migrate simply because it's a complicated trans-generational project and hard to pull off---like herding cats. Much easier to just stay put and eat what we have left until we die out in a few generations.

yea in theory you could migrate, but in practice, the updates / iron, generational food, and homeland babies, made it more difficult and not much worth.

People normally would migrate if the population is higher then the natural resources can sustain, or because of a thread like war / natural disasters. But in our case there is no benefit to go somewhere else, because we can just bring the kerosene to the old village and then have in theory all the iron and water we want. And compared to a new Eve camp there is no incentive to create an offspring village, since eve would get all the iron and initial food bonus for free.

With the oceans / rivers / mountains, its just that some natural stuff that creates different areas and give some orientation and limit to the movement / world would be very interesting to have. More a natural feeling how our world is, where you need to cross mountains or rivers or even oceans to reach an new area.

Spoonwood · 2021-04-12 15:55:08

jasonrohrer wrote:

Why this problem now? It's because ...

No, it was not because of those reasons, because the game still has similar problems now almost a year later after those changes.

The problem lies in that iron mines are connected to water sources, which was never a good idea, and that tapout exists also. It's even clearer now that tapout is the problem, since oil tapout leaves much of the nearby map barren of new tarry spots.

And yes, I do mean that the problem is tapout. Bigserver2 is almost never even *half* full of players. It's not able to scale to maximum server population (and hasn't since tarry spots depleted), because of the problems caused by tapout.

Oh, and things are still basically as bad as Tarr said above, except it's tapout mechanics:

Tarr wrote:

You can't live near each other due to [tapout] mechanics and even if you could by trying to settle close you can't get iron unless your neighbor gives it up. Which then of course is made worse by not being able to understand others because the language system wasn't designed with this sort of thing in mind which leaves us with a bunch of mechanics clashing with each other. Also, settling close causes you to be starting on potentially ravished lands.

There was a white family with 1 iron mine, when they should have had like 3 or 4 on their fault line recently, but tapout messed everything up: https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues/754

Tarr wrote:

Basically unless it's server reset people can't be close and even if they are it's possible for Eves to kill each other by making a well

The last part also can scarcely be considered to be theoretical, since there was a white Eve camp wrecked by tapout *in some jungle* recently. The well in the jungle band got dug up *after* iron unlock, so the family couldn't have a shallow well close to its iron veins even if it had survived:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues/752

That sort of tapout killing off a camp also could theoretically happen during an arc restart, if it hasn't already.

None of the tapouts scale to maximum player population on a server.

Water tapout ensures that families rush main technologies, and then it's clear as heck why families make all craftable objects in so few generations. Because taking things slow and focusing on teaching/helping new players simply isn't feasible and runs contrary to rushing the main technologies.

Without tapout Eves wouldn't wander around looking for a spot (when trying to find a new spot) as much, since having enough mines nearby would be more likely.

And tarry spot tapout doesn't help anyone.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2021-04-12 16:05:02)

DestinyCall · 2021-04-12 16:59:20

Bad Spoon. Bad. You've been warned about this repeatedly.

No more necroing. Just stop it.

If you want to talk about the tapout system in reference to the current state of the game, start a new thread to make your argument and include a link back to this thread for reference, if necessary.

Don't resurrect 9 month old topics so you can have a one-sided argument with Jason. It is annoying and confuses people.

Tarr · 2021-04-12 18:42:09

I smell a ban coming.

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#26 2020-06-22 15:51:01

Re: Why so distant? - about game difficulty

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Re: Why so distant? - about game difficulty

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Re: Why so distant? - about game difficulty

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Re: Why so distant? - about game difficulty

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