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Kinrany

Member

Registered: 2018-01-22

Posts: 712

The bear cave in the room

Spoonwood resurrected an old thread, and I wrote a long comment before noticing that. But the problem is still here, and I think I found its root.

This is a game about parenting and civilization building. How come lineages do not last longer?

The easiest way for a lineage to survive is to go north forever. You need just three skills:

1. Walking

2. Eating berries

3. Feeding children

This is the optimal strategy. It's also the most boring thing in the game, you don't even need the tutorial. And bored people invent their own rules or quit the game altogether.

Parenting and civilization building are two separate activities. They are misaligned, one of them makes people quit, so everyone who haven't quit are doing the other one.

The game needs to remove the distinction between a lineage and a town. Caring about the lineage should be the same as caring about the town, and vice versa.

A family shouldn't be able to survive for long without a town, even with expert players. A naked Eve should be rushing to build a mud hut ASAP, hoping that she doesn't die to factors outside her control. There should be no cheese strategy that makes you win the lineage game by being more resistant to boredom than the players in the other lineage. The family and the town should be pushing for the next tech level, lest they run out of resources available to them at the current tech level and in the current location.

• One civilization per lineage. Migrating to another town and starting from scratch should not be an option. Being an Eve should be the hardest thing possible.

• One lineage per civilization. Sacrificing the family to keep the town habitable for the next Eve should not be an option.

With this in mind, there's what I think we could do.

1. Use the one Eve per server idea. This will prevent multi-family towns.

2. Make the wilderness super dangerous. Starting a new town should be harder than recovering. Leaving should be a death sentence.

3. To address the problem of a lineage running out of real life players, add a magical altar. It will spawn a single player once the server is empty, and require food to recharge.

There is another way. The trade-off between parenting and civilization building could be made into an explicit conflict and the central part of the game.

Every player would face the dilemma: sacrifice the needs of your own children, or sacrifice the greater good of the whole civilization.

Unfortunately I think all parents are literally brainwashed by their own genes and I'm totally on the side of the civilization here, so I don't know how to turn this into an interesting choice.

For what it's worth, here's my list of reasons people care about children.

1. The selfish gene. You have been born, therefore your parents probably really, truly wanted to have children, therefore you probably do too.

2. The needs of the civilization. Your civilization exists, so it probably has an ideology that manipulates people into having more children for it's farms, factories and armies.

3. Your own needs. The best friend is someone you personally built and customized to do what you want it to do. We can't do that yet, but growing one out of meat and training it is a good enough substitute.

4. A universal moral imperative. You lead a principled life and help everyone. But somehow you still prioritize your own children over Bob's.

5. An accident. There was no reason, it was equally probable for you to care about stamp collection.

Spoonwood

Member

Registered: 2019-02-06

Posts: 4,369

Re: The bear cave in the room

The easiest way for a lineage to survive is to go north forever. You need just three skills:

    Walking

    Eating berries

    Feeding children

This is the optimal strategy.

It's not clear to me that such is optimal.  A family that did that wouldn't have fire, so they would end up in the back of the fertility queue with respect to temperature, and yum since they would have neutral biome temperature and no yum.  That might not often matter, but during the wee hours of the morning (U. S. EST time), I've heard that getting children can become a serious challenge. 

The one Eve per server idea is not compatible with families trading.

If the wilderness were super dangerous city walls might become very useful without building them because of (rational) fear of outside griefers.

---

Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.

Kinrany

Member

Registered: 2018-01-22

Posts: 712

Re: The bear cave in the room

We could have multiple towns per server, but with millions of tiles between them. And use something like planes for trading. AFAIK we still don't have trading, so it could even be an improvement

DestinyCall

Member

Registered: 2018-12-08

Posts: 4,563

Re: The bear cave in the room

Serious question - what would you trade with a village millions of miles away using a plane?     If you are able to build a plane, you already have an excess of iron, oil, and time.

Kinrany

Member

Registered: 2018-01-22

Posts: 712

Re: The bear cave in the room

Robot parts, probably

DestinyCall

Member

Registered: 2018-12-08

Posts: 4,563

Re: The bear cave in the room

Robot parts, probably

I like this answer.