a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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There is talk in other threads about the lack of trading and how it can be improved, however I think this needs a dedicated thread.
One issue is that every village has access to everything they need, and the work of trading is often more than the work of gathering the resources yourself.
More rare resources would help. I am thinking monolith level of rarity. The resource could be accessed in abundance but is nearly useless on its own. It needs to be combined with other rare resources to reach the next level of tech. This would provide a natural environment for towns to pop up at each resource and trade routes be setup between them.
This brings up another issue of motivation. There simply isn’t a need to do this even if the tech were amazing. The game is about survival and we can do this indefinitely in the current state.
Resources need to be finite to give reason for jumping to later tech. I guess this will happen once that later tech exists.
One Hour One Life Crafting Reference
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Places either need to be really close to each other so that regular interaction can occur or making roads to connect places together needs to be much less tedious overall. Creating a 100 tile long stretch of flat rock road ends up costing 100 flat rocks (duh) and 500 clicks which gets rather tedious rather fast. Doing something like stakes + mallet = floor stakes would cut down on clicks immensely while still having a cost for convenience. Also having sort sort of way to produce flat rocks from either large stones or a replacement for flat stones could help with the travel related aspects of trade.
fug it’s Tarr.
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If jason adds the bury return mechanic.
Villages could probably survive longer, but at the same time they need more iron to bury people. (shovel uses)
Iron runs out -> encourages trading.
Also people who can get back to a village, might remember the position of other villages near by.
But villages need to spawn closer in order for this to work.
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My suggestion? Rivers and oceans.
Historically, waterways have been the natural "roads" that allowed distant places to trade. It is why port cities tended to be rich centers of commerce. Boat travel is much faster than walking and allows two distant locations to be connected easily. Also, water is a central resource for civilization, so people naturally tend to settle near rivers and other sources of fresh water. Follow the river and find more villages.
Oceans create solid barriers for expansion and early travel, but also allow VERY distant people to eventually contact each other, if they are able to survive the hazards of ocean travel. These distant places might have valuable resources that are either very rare or never seen before on your side of the ocean.
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Ocean and river trading was better IRL, because you could move big cargo at low cost. Here in game moving cart is free, so ships would need even greater load capacity. The problem is, everything must fit one tile. So no ships, maybe boat which may be container possible to stack like 20 items and a sailor himself. Sounds crazy, but I like the idea!
But this is not a problem. If trade would be profitable, it would occur even without oceans. In Europe-Asia there is proof to long land trade routes even in paleolit era, before agriculture.
The problem is economic I believe:
1. Trade would be beneficial to village, but not as much for trader. Imagine your village is lacking soil and somebody brought a full cart of it on its own. Will he be rewarded? Or the villagers will take everything as their own, because it is considered a village property? This is, because game design discourage ownership (My thread about it).
2. Comparative advantage. You don't need a monopoly on carrots. You don't even have to be better in making carrots. You can be worse than your trade partner. If comparative advantage is big enough, the trade will occur and you will sell carrots to your partner. The problem here is meta, because successful villages are always formed at forest/grassland/swamp border, because access to rabbits, ponds and soil/food is crucial for survival. It was suggested to Jason multiple times, to make each biome sustainable on its own, then the trade will occur without further changes, because of limited access to certain resources. I will make thread with maths in my FTW series about it.
Last edited by Glassius (2019-04-03 09:57:17)
Suggestions: more basic tools, hugs, more violence, day/night, life tokens, yum 2.0
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You can't have meaningful trade without private property. Which doesn't exist right now.
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Currently there is no reason to trade as every village has everything. In history, trading happened because party A had something party B wanted, and vice versa. That's just not the case in this game most of the time - the one exception that comes to mind is when you trade clothing for another piece of clothing.
People trade either useful core resources or luxuries. In OHOL, every village has access to the same core resources, and luxuries don't really play a role - if you really like lobster in real life you'll pay extra for it, but ingame lobster is just nutritional value, same as a carrot. The only luxury that might work (and already does work, kinda) is clothing. You can show it off, but then again most people don't care about the looks, they just want the most efficient item. And even if you do really covet a specific item of clothing you can craft it yourself most of the time.
What if there were special rare resources that only spawned once every thousand tiles, like silkworms that allow you to make special silk clothing, or rare dyes for both clothing and buildings, or marble deposits that could be crafted into special tombstones and statues, or animals that can be hunted and crafted into special clothing/decorative items. Luxury items that you can show off.
Let's say that we do have a reason to trade and that we decide to trade. I have a small cart where I store my wares, and a random person comes along. They offer me their gold bar for a basket of pies. I agree, but before I have a chance to react they grab the basket and run away. I cannot physicially block them, I cannot catch them, I cannot grab them. My only course of action is to kill them, and that seems really awkward. Imagine working in a store, someone shoplifts, and the only thing you can do is murder them on the spot.
You might say, "Oh, just build a building and lock it," but building a building like that is a multi-generational effort and most people wouldn't be happy with a single person claiming ownership of it.
Right now you can have multiple people standing on the same tile. What if that applied only to members of your family? That would encourage familiar separation, as you wouldn't want to share a smithy with an outsider since they would be a hinderance. You could also block people from accessing certain area with your body. If another family moved into your territory you'd probably want them gone as their very presence would be making your life more difficult. This would kind of enable private propery, in a way? The more I think about this the more I like it.
Let's talk about roads - trade can't happen without them. Currently ingame roads have to be built tile by tile before they can be used. My understanding is that in real life roads were formed by travelers and traders who naturally left a trail on the ground where them and their caravans walked. This would probably be impossible to implement, and it would be an incredibly massive amount of data to store, but what if each ground tile had a health value?
Let's say that a grassland tile has 100 health - every time a cart, horse rider, or car crosses that tile the health of the tile goes down by one. You could also use a road making machine (a massive boulder sledge or something) to deal ten damage to that grass tile. Once the tile's health goes down below twenty it becomes a dirt road. Health would go up over time, so if a road stops being used it would go back to a normal tile. Something like this sounds completely impossible to implement, but I think it would make for interesting gameplay.
Bodies of water and boats would likely be a good way of trading as well. Rivers and ocean/lake biomes are definitely up there on my wishlist. The ocean/lake biome would probably have to to be salt water as to not make the current water tech completely obsolete, and the rivers would have to give you muddy water that had to be processed before watering your crops or something.
Last edited by Twisted (2019-04-03 11:48:09)
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What if there were special rare resources that only spawned once every thousand tiles, like silkworms that allow you to make special silk clothing, or rare dyes for both clothing and buildings, or marble deposits that could be crafted into special tombstones and statues, or animals that can be hunted and crafted into special clothing/decorative items. Luxury items that you can show off.
This would sort of help, maybe. If they're just luxury goods it'll be kind of hit and miss. And conversely, if they're part of vital tech, you risk that at any given moment nobody would have access to one or more key resources, simply because nobody spawned near one or managed to survive long. widely scattered luxury goods is definitely easier to create and balance than a web of strategically important goods.
As for roads, turn the car into an asphalt paving machine. As long as it's has a tank of tar, it lays a road wherever it goes, so long as it is adjacent to an existing road tile (if that's even game-engine possible). It needs to have better economy than rails though. Way better.
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obviously currency
and not physical currency
cause it takes more time to go to another city and say that you need 5 steel and you can give a cart of pies, than to go out, fetch a cart of iron and process into steel
and right now you can just take it and go on your way
maybe with teams suggestion, if you are part of blue team, you cannot touch items red team has, but we would need some sort of territories to do so
so they got a town, with 100x100 area, if you enter it you cannot interact with objects, you need permission to do so, the only thing you can do is offer items for other items, like 2 boxes, when you both fill the box and agree, a trade takes place
doing my sprites soemone had a question:
could it be possible that if you make boards out of different trees, they would look different?
now if a family would have cherry color floors, and other would have pine color, that would be a good thing, like you can not make cherry wood, you can only trade for it
you can even help them to make, like get butt logs for you but cutting the wood yourself would result in yellow boards
the other idea i got:
Frostpunk had Cores, this were rare items, you got like 3 in start of the game, you can use it to either produce food at home, or higher level coal mines. if you choose a Coal mine, you don't have enough for a Hothouse
so virtual currency, like a family can choose a path:
after 10 generations people could vote what they want, all i can think of is more cosmetic, but maybe you could have special items like domesticated rabbits or such. if family A chooses this, they can get more furs
other family cannot choose the same perk and they can do more pies with same resource, so it would make sense to trade for it
the other idea is to take out the transportation part, you place items into a container, you accept the trade
maybe some waiting time, but your resources magically come there to your market building
you offer 20 pies for 2 iron
they accept it, a trade takes place
later they offer 30 pies for 2 steel, people are hungry and you already win on the processing
some way to make your work worth some thing
either this, or different families would have completely different tech tree, same parallel thing, but they could make different looking fur shoes or fur hats than you, different boards, different adobe
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7986 livestock pens 4.0
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4411 maxi guide
Playing OHOL optimally is like cosplaying a cactus: stand still and don't waste the water.
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This would probably be impossible to implement, and it would be an incredibly massive amount of data to store, but what if each ground tile had a health value?
Let's say that a grassland tile has 100 health - every time a cart, horse rider, or car crosses that tile the health of the tile goes down by one. You could also use a road making machine (a massive boulder sledge or something) to deal ten damage to that grass tile. Once the tile's health goes down below twenty it becomes a dirt road. Health would go up over time, so if a road stops being used it would go back to a normal tile. Something like this sounds completely impossible to implement, but I think it would make for interesting gameplay.
This is such a neat idea.
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omnem cibum costis
tantum baca, non facies opus
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It's interesting, to me, how hard this problem is. I have yet to hear (or think of) a solution that jumps out at me as something that would definitely work.
The reason you don't go down to Ecuador to buy bananas for 5 cents per pound, and are willing to pay 50 cents per pound at the store (transport trade) has a ton of factors involved. My core thesis with this game was that time is precious in real life. You don't travel to Ecuador (on foot, which would be free) every time you want bananas because you're going to die someday. Same for why you don't make your own pie from scratch every time you want one in real life. Developing the capital resources that allow economics of scale in pie-making takes time. I was hoping that making time precious in the game would motivate trade, but apparently, it didn't work. Time seems even more precious in this game than in real life, but....
The property rights thing is a red herring. We have property rights in real life because we claim them and defend them. They are not inherent. If I went down to Ecuador to try to pick free bananas, I would probably be beaten or shot. That is why I would at least need to pay 5 cents per pound for them. Walled gardens are possible in this game, but no one builds them. A monopoly on pies is possible, along with trade for core ingredients, and "bring back my plate, please," but it ain't happening.
Perhaps it has something to do with the amount of time needed to build the capital resources required for trade being disproportionately large relative to the time savings from trade. It might take 2-3 generations to build the walled pie shop and walled wheat field to go along with it. Chances are, the thread will be lost before it ever happens. In real life, such things can easily be accomplished by one individual in the spring of their lifetime, allowing them to reap the efficiency benefits for the rest of their life. And for the people inheriting (or buying) those capital resources later, the efficiency gains are a no-brainer.
Maybe we claim and defend property rights in real life because it's cheap enough to do so, relative to the efficiency benefits of having property rights.
A number of people have said, "Make walls cheaper." Maybe that's the problem.... maybe walls should be the fundamental unit in the game. Maybe locks should just fall from the sky. I can imagine a nightmare maze of walls in every town, though, along with crazy griefing problems. "Jason, you just have to do something about all these damn walls!"
I also have an instinct to make everything hard to make, so that actually making it feels like an accomplishment. I don't want to make anything easy.
But crazy idea: what if every character could make walls for free? Like, literally "middle click to make wall" or something.
Or maybe only elders could do it, so you'd have to ask them for help in your capital projects. I can already make the age limit high for anything I want. I could make the age limit very high (50+) for placing stakes, but wall-building "free" after that. Like, once you have a blob of adobe, you can make infinite adobe walls, but you need some elder's help to place the stakes. I could also institute and upper age limit for certain other things (like adobe or stones themselves), so that an elder couldn't go buck wild building unilateral walls at the end of life. Thus, every wall placed would require a bit of consensus.
(And strangely, this is already the case in almost any city in the world. You can't break ground on a construction project without having your building plans approved by the town elders---aka, the building and planning board).
Something similar is already happening de facto with knives in the game, and I love it. There's usually an elder in the town who carries the only knife, and you have to go ask them to help you with any knife projects (like killing a sheep). I suppose it could be as simple as the stakes getting dull after their first use, and you need to sharpen them with a knife (and knives are hard enough to make that they serve as a nice gate).
Or what if Eve starts off with a "planning device" next to her, and that device gives her a monopoly over placing walls stakes, and she decides who to pass the device on to before she dies. Sorta like the "town architect" hat or something. Or a special stone that is needed to sharpen wall stakes after each use. So then access to the stone could be delegated with whatever mechanism you want (a locked room with three doors, and three keys, and three elders who sharpen stakes for people).
Anyway, if sufficient consensus mechanisms were available, walls, doors, locks, tracks, and roads could be made extremely cheap (or even free after the basic tech was made). It would be up to each town to determine their own protocols to limit proliferation. There could even be wall-free towns, if the town elders decided to go that route.
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I love the knives-thing going on. Now, how to make stuff inherited without knowing to whom you give it to. I wonder why key copies are not used on town centers/bakeries, I think that was the idea behind those items.
Edit: oh, game already counts (I think 8x8 rooms), so implementing like five ppl in one room, all above age 50, saying "my build power to Jason" would give an amount of "free" walls/8x length road by cost of one ? If not done, nobody would have any "wall building" power.
S.
Last edited by Sukallinen (2019-04-03 15:50:00)
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Trading cant happen unless there are two distinct areas to trade between. We need to be closer together
Be kind, generous, and work together my potatoes.
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Something similar is already happening de facto with knives in the game, and I love it. There's usually an elder in the town who carries the only knife, and you have to go ask them to help you with any knife projects (like killing a sheep).
I feel like this is more wistful thinking on your part than actual reality. I can't remember a single life where the only village knife was in the elder's hands.
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Really? This has happened to me personally several times.
Who's got the knife? I had to ask around, and then the person with the knife walked over and did the task for me (killing the sheep) instead of lending me the knife.
I even had the knife passed on to me when they died, because they thought I was trustworthy.
I think the file had been hidden away or something, making it really tedious to make a new knife.
There were also other lives where there was no knife anymore, even though there clearly used to be one.
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It happens yes but a modestly experienced player can make a file and knife fairly quickly i wouldn't think they would make a good gate
Be kind, generous, and work together my potatoes.
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Really? This has happened to me personally several times.
Who's got the knife? I had to ask around, and then the person with the knife walked over and did the task for me (killing the sheep) instead of lending me the knife.
I even had the knife passed on to me when they died, because they thought I was trustworthy.
I think the file had been hidden away or something, making it really tedious to make a new knife.
There were also other lives where there was no knife anymore, even though there clearly used to be one.
Sorry, I guess I misunderstood you - I thought you were trying to say that only one 'leader person' carries the only knife.
In my experience knives are usually kept in backpacks/aprons and you usually only give them away right before death, bascially minimizing the chance of a random griefer slaughtering all the sheep or killing other people. Towns usually have multiple knives, not just one, and they're not in the hands of the elders - they're in the hands of whoever gets their hand on them (usually bakers or sheep herders), and then they don't leave their backpacks until they're dead.
Most villages have multiple knives, as having only one knife means that's the only weapon around, and if it falls into the wrong hands there will be trouble.
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The property rights thing is a red herring. We have property rights in real life because we claim them and defend them. They are not inherent. If I went down to Ecuador to try to pick free bananas, I would probably be beaten or shot. That is why I would at least need to pay 5 cents per pound for them. Walled gardens are possible in this game, but no one builds them. A monopoly on pies is possible, along with trade for core ingredients, and "bring back my plate, please," but it ain't happening.
I've been proposing "property rights" for family units but obviously they couldn't be enforced by the game.
Lets say in real life you had a hammer that vanished. If a roommate showed up with the same identical hammer then you would know that it most likely belongs to you. You would have the responsibility to claim it back or let it go.
Every single item in game looks like the other. Two hammers would look exactly the same. In real life you have imperfections, a dent, some sort of tag with a name, some engraving, somewhere you haven't cleaned properly but been meaning to, whatever. People can recognize their property. But in the game there is no way of knowing. How can I get something back if I'm not sure if anything someone else is holding was actually mine? If it had some sort of tag with the family name of the "real" owner then one would be able to know that it was stolen. The precious owner should then decide if they want to try to get it back by force or not. That's how you enforce "property rights".
It's kind like how we know who just killed someone. We see them holding a bloody knife. If there was no indication that the knife was just used in a murder how would anyone who didn't witness it know? We don't have that information with stealing.
We can't enforce something when we have no information to base our actions on.
Last edited by Thaulos (2019-04-03 16:15:16)
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I think it is worthwhile to look back at ancient times and consider why people in the real world started long distance trade. They did not start by trading pies for iron or carrots for rabbit skins. Pre-trade, you made essential things locally because you had to be self-sufficient to survive. The first long distance trade routes were focused on rare luxury goods that were common or more easily produced in one area but valued elsewhere. Spice trading was a BIG deal back when everyone was eating bland staple foods. Salt trading was another major commodity. You can survive without spices, silks, and gems, but people love their luxuries. And they were willing to pay someone else for making the effort to bring them these riches from afar.
The trade dilemma is three-fold. We need greater regional distinction - crops that only grow in specific places, precious minerals which must be harvested on-site like iron and oil, rare crafting ingredients that take time and tech to access - and we need efficient means of connecting together distant towns - roads, rails, rivers, maps - and we need better ways to transport (and store) trade goods.
If you want to stimulate trade, you need to make it meaningful and beneficial to advanced towns. Eve camps and early settlements SHOULD be self-sufficient. They are small and locally focused. But eventually, they should grow to a point where trade becomes feasible. And later on, they should get to a point where trade is vitally important. I think that creating greater stratification of resources will help to achieve that. And it will make late game progression more interesting, since it gives new goals for older towns. I think we already have the backbone necessary for trade goods in the game. Yum bonus foods and advanced tech (radio, car, plane). If some foods and key crafting ingredients, like zinc or copper, were region-locked, it would encourage people to build outposts in distant biomes or establish trade with towns that were located closer natural deposits.
Here is an article that talks about trade 5000 years ago: https://www.livescience.com/4823-ancien … world.html We didn't start with Amazon Prime and neither should OHOL.
Edit: To expand on what I mean by "region-locking" - what if you actually had to grow foods in the same biome where you harvested the wild plants? You shouldn't be able to grow a tomato plant in a tundra. Or a wheat plant in a desert. So why not make jungle plants only viable when grown on a jungle tile. And the same with the other plants. Perhaps further tech could eventually make it possible to grow crops out their ideal climate (greenhouse?) but early villages would be limited in the type of foods they could easily produce for themselves in the biomes around their village. To gain access to new and interesting foods (and higher yum) would require making farming outposts in adjacent biomes or trading with neighboring villages. Likewise, mineral resources like copper and zinc could require more extensive mining operations rather than being readily available on the surface for gathering. I'd love to see mining outposts develop in mineral-rich areas. Perhaps after the initial mine tunnel collapses, a Newcomen drill could be built that operates similar to the Newcomen pump - manual labor to continue producing resources at a cost. If mines remained productive for generations, it might encourage people to build support structures to improve quality of life for the miners and to ensure that the mine's location was not lost when the original miner died.
Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-04-03 16:53:06)
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I'm not worried about long distance trade just yet.
I'm thinking about any trade at all, even local trade.
Why is there no pie-maker in town? I mean, there is, kinda... but what's with all this goddamned sharing.
We don't share like this in real life, and I think the lack of sharing gives life some texture that just isn't present in the game. I mean, we can't even have proper crime in the game! If everything is mutual, it's impossible to steal!
Anyway, this was always my goal for the game. I looked at games like Rust and thought, "Why is there no trade? No social structure? No employees? No landlords? No crime? No posse? No sheriff? No law?" I mean, all the ingredients seem to be there, but nope.
I feel like I'm part way there, but still missing something.
And what I'm missing is NOT the silk road.
Heck, even in modern times, barter is alive and well. My friend has a strawberry farm. He has this thing called "share picking," where you pick 21 pounds of strawberries, and get to keep 7 pounds for free. The other 14 pounds go to him, which he sells to customers at his roadside stand. 7 pounds of free strawberries is pretty tempting for a family on a budget. But it's barter, plain and simple. Classic share cropping, really.
Help me water all these carrots, and I'll keep you and your kid fed.... where's that even, in the game?
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Places either need to be really close to each other so that regular interaction can occur or making roads to connect places together needs to be much less tedious overall. Creating a 100 tile long stretch of flat rock road ends up costing 100 flat rocks (duh) and 500 clicks which gets rather tedious rather fast. Doing something like stakes + mallet = floor stakes would cut down on clicks immensely while still having a cost for convenience. Also having sort sort of way to produce flat rocks from either large stones or a replacement for flat stones could help with the travel related aspects of trade.
In my experience, getting the flat rocks with a horsecart takes substantially longer than pounding down the stakes and throwing the rock onto the stakes. And that's using a horsecart, not a cart, or worse. I agree that doing such ends up very repetitive in nature.
Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.
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Why is there no pie-maker in town? I mean, there is, kinda... but what's with all this goddamned sharing.
I do see what you're getting at, but I gotta say, part of me can't help but be super amused at how much of this discussion feels like it's coming from you going, "I made a cooperative game, and people are playing it cooperatively! Help! What did I do wrong?"
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Trade is cooperative. It's also much more interesting than one big communal soup.
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Well. Early villages were sharing everything since everything was a communal effort.
Hmm. Have you tried nonlethal combat?
You can't protect your carrots unless you can defend them.
All we can do right now is:
1) run after and shout
2) run after them and kill them (can survive) and potentially die due murder cooldown.
Why can't i just slap the carrot off his mouth right there and then the moment he picks it up?
Then again he's probably the piemaker and will barr me off the kitchen ;(
Thing is this issue is multicomples!
organisation for better job distinction? Megsphones to help carry out orders and have actual central organisation?
a change of mentality of players? (esp those that only workworkwork and yell at those that immerse themselves in lives)
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A good road solution would be macadam road.
implement rare quarries from which rocks can be hauled by cart, which can be ground down and a single half ground down could satisfy 5 tiles, signifucantly improving roadmaking speed once a quarry is set up.
this also leaves up an option to upgrade them later. Many rural areas after dirt have macadam roads before they slowly got replaced to better.
Last edited by Amon (2019-04-03 16:52:26)
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