a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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wondible wrote:GeminiZod wrote:Ignorance is bliss for new players and I feel like for the time being until they are up to speed we should adopt a Luddite mentality. Many of us veterans were privileged with the experience of developing our skills during Desert Eden and a time when food, soil, water and iron was simply easier.
I've sometimes thought it would be nice to have experience based servers. New players start at server1, where they will likely find eves and primitive camps figuring how to make fire. But everybody will be in the same boat and able to relate to what hey are going through (the weirdness of the iron system may be an issue here, but maybe we don't even expect iron at this stage) After so many hours, they graduate to the next server, where people are little farther along but still able to relate. We don't really have the population to slice people up like that though.
You Are Hope does move people around to different servers. It does have more players, but I don't think it's that many more players. So, I think the player population does exist for moving people around. Thing is, this game isn't conceptualized on having interesting in-game mechanics, technology, or possibilities, unlike You Are Hope.
The problem I see at the moment is endgame is different for all races. Our red headed overlords the Ginger families are set for life once they complete their engine and they are the only ones who can access oil easily due to tundra biome. Being in a Black family is really nice since you can get horse carts which will allow you to find Gingers. They trade you oil and you trade them horse carts and sulfur. Your retain your bargaining power when trading with Gingers as everyone needs horses. Next are Latino family which can offer the final component which is rubber and palm oil to the Ginger's master plan. But once you give them what they want you lose all your leverage unless they have a weird craving for bananas. As White family you offer nothing but an easy roleplaying experience. The Gingers will laugh at you but they will let you stay in their village and pity you as a second class citizen.
Unlike other RTS games there needs to be more balance on races. In starcraft there are 3 races (Terran, Zerg and Protoss) each diversified with strengths and weaknesses. OHOL accomplishes this by giving each race a weakness and no strengths which you get used to if you stick around long enough. At the core of our game's imbalance is the Diesel Engine which is the end game unit or the foundation which all long term towns survive on. We have 4 races in OHOL and each of them should have an easy way to access water. Currently this game heavily favors two races the Blacks and the Gingers. Black family due to their ability to provide everyone a form of transportation and Gingers due to being the equivalent of the nation of Saudi Arabia and holding the life of all towns captive with their access to oil. This is why I despise the engine.
I agree that all towns eventually die. And with the steam sale it is more important to encourage our growing playerbase that it is a friendly community to encourage them to stay and learn rather than scare them away with arbitrary standards to extend the life of a virtual town for a few more generations. The problem is not with new players which I do enjoy teaching. But playing in advanced towns right now is such a shame as new players are starving due to lack of basic necessities. Cisterns are empty for some reason which leads to no compost is being generated and pies/stews running low. On the forums and in game people are scapegoating new players for berry munching and not yumming as being the bane of towns but it is not their fault as unsuccessful and even successful engine building drains towns of resources. If the majority of new players are having a bad time simply because of the potential of the Multipurpose Newcomen Engine to waste massive amounts of water and charcoal for no reason it makes sense to property fence them like successful towns do like for their diesel engine.
Not to come off as pretentious, OHOL is like a RTS game where like in Age of Empires 2 or Starcraft 2 there is a certain build order to make sure you don't die. You need an to build supply depos and army to protect your workers even if that comes at the expense of advancement of technology. In our situation our supply is our food and clothing to avoid wasting pips and our army is everything we do in preparation of the engine or endgame (horse carts, rubber, paper, charcoal pencil). Even if you were to build an engine you would have to go through a 3 step process contacting Ginger, Black and Mexican families if you are white or an easier 2 step process if you use heutw and plex as an ethnic family. As you can see I am in the Valley of Despair of the Dunning Kruger process as I had to learn all this training to simply use the engine and I am dreading that new players will become discouraged once they hear of this gameplay loop.
Ignorance is bliss for new players and I feel like for the time being until they are up to speed we should adopt a Luddite mentality. Many of us veterans were privileged with the experience of developing our skills during Desert Eden and a time when food, soil, water and iron was simply easier.
With the influx of new players there needs to be a advanced engine and smithing section in the tutorial. Recently I was born into the Eveans family and there were newer players who were doing a trial and error approach to using engine. They spent around 9 buckets of water in total doing what would take a veteran only bucket. To put that in perspective that is around 80 berry bushes (8 buckets lost) that could have been watered or if you spent that water growing berries, carrots, cabbage and wheat that is a lot of soil and pies lost for nothing.
Onetech.info should be your best friend or simply googling "ohol engine" will save your town so much water. At the end they did produce a Crank Shaft, Cam Shaft and 6 extra Fuel Nozzle Bodys in total which is less than optimal. They could have been building Fuel Injection Nozzles for sprinkler pipes but after a few attempts I started to lose confidence in their smithing abilities. In this situation all I could do to stop them was removing the yew shaft and rope until they died from old age as our leader was out of town.
I believe newer people are entering the peak of the Dunning-Kruger Effect chart. Their false confidence makes them think, "Hey if I build an dIesAl eNgiNe or shiny sprinklers I will save all the problems with this town". They don't look around and realize their town is low on steel tools, pies, soil and squash, beans and corn needed for Three Sisters Stew. This is why whenever I see roleplayers, berry munchers or even sheep killers nowadays I feel relieved as they will never cause as much damage as engine enthusiasts.
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