a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this even possible if the reset condition is 35 families? Wouldn't most people end up losing all their lives before it was even close?
This looks awesome. I will try this when I get the chance.
And I like that hunger decays more slowly. In the main game it can be hard to get anything done sometimes with how often you have to eat.
Becoming eve and living to 60 should never go hand in hand.
This will only attract griefers and make your own survival more important to anyone that wants to become Eve. Which is NOT the point of this game.
Bad idea, next.
What if you got Eve tokens based on how many of your kids lived to 30? With males, maybe how many of your sister's kids.
Plox. I don't know what that means, but I'll say it for storage.
The long shaft idea might be used to grief by taking every long shaft in sight and hitting random townspeople with them, but I love the defensive tool idea. That would be great. We're kind of powerless right now but a way to defend against attacks without a sword would be a game changer.
On the topic of town defense, I've already suggested this, but guard dogs. Put them at the edges of your village. They bark when non family or dangerous animals get in range, and if an animal gets close they attack. With a human maybe only have them attack if they're wielding a weapon, but hopefully the sound of barking would notify the town that something was going on and give advance of a possible threat nearby.
Honestly, general survival in this game is too hard for what it hopes to accomplish. I get that making a civilization shouldn't be easy, but surely a lot of new players are turned off by how easy it is to starve and how many times they die as a kid before they get the hang of surviving. Some probably just say forget it and quit playing.
We are supposed to be parenting our children, but are regularly forced to abandon them, and for the sake of the town they need to start contributing at age three. We are trying to build a civilization, but there's no time to teach when everyone is rushing around trying to not starve and get stuff done at the same time. New players regularly die because they are unable to drop items. It's so normal for people to starve that others generally don't react. Skeletons of starvation victims litter our towns, but we continue on as though our various family members' dead bodies haven't been sitting by the berries for thirty years because we've got more pressing matters to deal with. Many lives are such a frantic race to survive that the small things, like saying hi to your grandkids or even just having a non-rushed conversation with a family member, can't happen. We just need a minute to breathe every once in a while. I know this will get a lot of flak, but lowering the hunger bar depletion rate would help with new player retention.
I keep trying to be constructive but it falls apart again and again. I gather iron my whole life. Someone steals it all in two seconds. I'm minding my own business farming carrots, and suddenly a rogue Eve stabs me. Makes me not want to bother. I want to build a civilization. I don't want to steal, I don't want to kill, and I don't want to play run from the murderer.
Sometimes I'll be looking around a town and think, 'You know, this is nice. My daughters are maintaining the farms, my son is cooking, my sister is smithing, and... wait. That's my aunt? And that's not my sister, that's just her identical third cousin twice removed.'
And then it's kind of like, were the interactions I remember with my kids... actually my kids? Was I bonding with them, or one of our many identical family members? Everyone kind of blurs together as it is now. It gets hard to care about your family when you can't tell who they are.
Most lives feel the same. Every town is in a green biome near a swamp. Every town has sheep and a bakery and a smithing area and a berry and carrot farm, and there's not much difference between the towns because we are so hard pressed to survive that trying to make it any other way would kill us all.
And SpiritBomb32, that's a great idea. Ocean biomes would be fantastic and lead to more strategic placement of towns. If there were boats, it might be dangerous to have your town too close to the water or you'd risk naval invasions. Would be super cool if you could make boats and ride them across the water, but even without them oceans would be great.
What if there were some detective tools that would help us to find the killer with a bit of work and preparation? Something beyond just listening to the testimony of the various people in town about the kill? For example if there were a way to detect if someone recently had bloody hands?
That's a great idea! I'd be all for having some way to detect recently bloody hands. Something like that wouldn't be foolproof either, which is good. Much of the time it wouldn't surely implicate the murderer, because they could claim they killed someone else for legit reasons. And if there were multiple murders, how could you prove they were the one who killed that one person and not that they killed the griefer ruining all the tools? But it would be pretty obvious what happened if there was a single murder at the edge of town and the person started running when people wanted to test their hands for blood.
Bwahaha! I'm the woman being held to the right.
You're right that the town ran out of food. A lot of residents started dying off from starvation or were killed by one of the many murderous Eves when I was in my late 30's. But to answer your question, I don't /die because I'm born a woman, but sometimes it's nice to just live a calm life without worrying about kids popping into existence left and right.
Add marriage or some type of bonding system that allows males to father children. It would incentivize parents to bond with their kids.
So right now it’s dangerous to trust other families. Multi-family settlements are really fun if everyone cooperates. I was just in a great village a few days ago with two families that got along well, surrounded by a property fence. I checked the family tree just now, and sure enough both families were dead. The last two generations were filled with murdered people. Several killed by non family members had last words to some effect of ‘curse him guys.’ It doesn’t make sense. These families have been living together for hundreds of years in-game time, and they still couldn’t curse each other, no matter how intertwined their lives were.
What if though, there was a way for families to form alliances? What if we could form nations or tribes consisting of multiple families?
Here’s how it could work. Swords can still only be used on non-family. That doesn’t change. There would still be some element of trust to living in multi-family villages. However, people of the same nation can curse each other, even if they’re not family members, deterring people from mass slaughtering other people just because they could. Forming a nation with other families would be an indicator of trust. It would still definitely be possible to attack other villages within your family, but it wouldn’t be so simple. Additionally, there could be some other benefits.
-A sense of ownership of the land and that your family is a part of something bigger. If you’re told that the land surrounding your town is part of your nation you might feel like you want to defend it, or claim it as your own.
-Potential for trade between nations, trading outposts, and war. For this to work, we really do need a few rare resources that would make it worthwhile to trade or go to war over, items that are needed for the next phase of technology that improves quality of life. We need stuff that makes it worth it to send people to bust down the enemy’s broken property fence walls.
-Large territories that promote more variety of gameplay. If this worked, players would have a greater choice in how they played. If they wanted to carry a sword and defend their nation, they could patrol the edges of their nation’s territory, raid border towns of other nations, or protect their own nation’s border towns. Players who wanted a chill life of cooperation with others with less risk of being killed by raiders, would live in the more interior part of their nation, where most of the risk would come from individual griefers, who would hopefully be dispatched and sent to Donkey Town.
Adding Individuals and Families to Nations
Just brainstorming here about how this might work. I know some people aren’t going to like that this is somewhat ‘magical’ but we need to have some central object that people can use to change their allegiances. Let’s just call it a nation totem. To start a new nation, people need to first build this nation totem. Then they need to declare themselves as members of a nation. To do this five people from a family might say, within range of the nation totem, “We are Fire Nation.” Or whatever nation they want to make. Once five people have said this (maybe within a certain time limit), everyone in their family becomes Firstname Lastname of Fire Nation. The totem changes to reflect this.
Now, the family has created a nation and another family nearby wants to join. They all gather by the nation totem. To accept an entire family, five members of the nation need to indicate that they accept this new family as a part of their nation. And five people from the new family need to indicate that they want to join this nation. This may be somewhat difficult considering they may not necessarily speak the same language. When both sets of people have expressed that they want to join the nation (through either a statement by the totem or some object), their family’s names then change to show that they are of Fire Nation. They are added to all gates that allow all of Fire Nation to pass.
Individuals could join too, without their family. Maybe this could take fewer people in the original nation to approve, and the person would need to state ‘I am of Fire Nation.’ If they were part of a different nation before, they would be removed from all property gates that allow entry to their former nation. Individuals could become spies, joining one nation and then revealing its secrets to another. There would need to be restrictions on how many times one could change nations.
Banishing Families and Individuals
Individuals banished could be banned from being born to that nation again. Families probably shouldn’t, because realistically a family could be like a third of all players on the server.
To do this fairly, many people should be required to banish someone.
Leaving Voluntarily
This should be somewhat difficult to do, to prevent abuse, but reasonable enough that someone could do it in ten or fifteen minutes, in the event that they wanted to leave their nation behind to be a nomad. Their name could read ‘formerly of Fire Nation’ for ten minutes after they left, and during that time, they could still be cursed by their former nation.
And that’s all I’ve got for now. Thoughts?
Just wanted to add that it would be great if tracking dogs could be used to search for natural resources as well. If you wanted to find ponds or iron or some rare item, or if well sites ever became random instead of being in a grid, you could have your dog lead you to it.
Looking back, a lot of this could end up turning into a complicated command system if dogs were allowed to do too many things, and I don't know how to resolve that besides making different breeds of dogs able to do different things. But I just think dogs could be so helpful and having practical uses for them would bring a lot of life to the game. It would be incredible if dogs were as important to the survival of a village as sheep or cows, and if OHOL permanently shifts to more fighting between towns, dogs could fill a niche for defensive play without breaking immersion.
So, there's not really a whole lot dogs can do right now, but what if we used them to solve some problems? I think dogs have the potential to be in-game anti-griefing tools, and on top of that, a defense against invasions from hostile families. Here are some ideas.
Tracking Dogs
It's a hassle to search for items hidden in the wilderness by griefers and near impossible to see if they drop them behind trees. But what if it was possible to track items? I think this could be a good use for dogs. Train the dog through some item (maybe if we could craft dog bones out of sheep skeletons?), then give them a search command. Not sure if it would work better for the dog to be able to search for specific items, or maybe they could just find the closest manmade item in a specific tile range. This would obviously only be useful relatively further from town. This could also obviously be used to steal items. Someone could defend against this by dropping items they don't want to throw off the tracking dog.
Guard Dogs
I suggested this one in another thread. It would be useful to have the ability to train dogs to defend the town from dangerous animals and hostile non-family. Guard dogs could be stationed at the outside perimeter of a town, and if a dangerous animal or non-family member got within range they'd start barking. If the threat got close enough they'd attack. This would hopefully also make it easier to defend against griefers luring bears into town, rogue boars suddenly running into the town's swamp biome border etc. They should only attack the humans wielding weapons, because we don't want to automatically kill peaceful people, but the barking would notify the town that there was something going on and that they should check it out.
Self-Defense/Companion Dogs
What if dogs could become loyal to their specific human and follow them around, maybe have a pack to carry items, and if trained, were able to attack things that can attack their human? I don't think it's a good idea right now for them to be able to attack other humans on command, but if their owner was attacked, the dog could start chasing the thing that harmed its human, not stopping until it caught up and bit the attacker, the attacker was forced to flee, or a set period of time passed.
These would be more for individual defense than the whole town. Possibly make it so this type of dog can’t be used while also holding swords, so they become a self defense tool for a weaponless person, rather than an attack dog that can be unleashed on an unsuspecting town. There’s also a danger that these could be used by griefers to stop people from killing them when they steal items and sabotage towns, and for this reason the dogs should be killable, only chase the individual who harmed its owner, and stop trying to attack after a set period time.
Some other possible safeguards: Maybe give dog bites a 50% chance of killing rather than 100%. Only one of this type of dog can be bonded to a person at a time and if its owner dies it can bond with another person. Possibly allow people to name another person as the dog’s second owner, so when the first person dies the dog becomes loyal to their second owner and starts protecting them instead. To make it so people can’t kill someone and then simply steal their dog by bonding with it, when a dog’s sole owner is dies and its time to attack is up it should return to its owner’s location, which is more likely to be by the person’s family.
Yeah, this is the type of dog I’m most shaky on. Without careful balancing, these self-defense/companion dogs could become griefing tools rather than anti-griefing ones, so it would be really important to have some safety checks in place if these existed. I like the idea though, they could end up being a deterrent to violence in cities and a way to defend explorers from dangerous wildlife in the wilderness.
Hunting Dogs
This one isn't my idea. This was a topic on the onelifesuggestions sub. Wouldn’t have any defensive purpose but thought I’d mention it since I’m on the topic of dogs anyway. These would be a quicker way to hunt rabbits from rabbit holes and geese from ponds. The player leads the dog on some type of leash, then clicks a rabbit hole and immediately gets a rabbit without the wait. Same with goose ponds.
I don't know dog breeds well enough to know which breeds should be trainable in which skills, but I think an expansion of dogs' uses like this would open up a lot of possibilities. Thoughts?
The ability to train dogs to defend the town from dangerous animals and hostile non-family. Guard dogs could be stationed at the outside perimeter of a town, and if a dangerous animal or non-family member got within range they'd start barking. If the threat got close enough they'd attack. This would hopefully also make it easier to defend against griefers luring bears into town, rogue boars suddenly running into the town's swamp biome border etc. They should only attack the humans wielding weapons, because we don't want to automatically kill peaceful people, but the barking would notify the town that there was something going on and that they should check it out.
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