Idea: Make Yum affect fertility

thundersen · 2018-12-02 13:49:55

First of all, hi everyone! I've been lurking and reading stuff here for about two months now.

I've had an idea that I'd like to get some feedback on before maybe suggesting it on the subreddit.

Problem: Population explosion by mothers keeping all their umpteen babies. Next to competent griefers I think this is the game's trickiest challenge at the moment. The established "solution" seems to be to exercise population control by killing people in one form or another. I don't like it. It causes frustration for new players who don't see the need for it and you risk being cursed to Donkeytown for trying to save your lineage. For me killing mothers and children for the "greater good" is also not a very satisfying experience in a game.

Suggestion: Reduce the chances of giving birth when a baby is due by x% when yum is below y. x could be 50 and y 1 for starters.

The intended effect is to significantly reduce the number of babies that mums can spam, if they eat nothing but berries. A small yum requirement should be easy to fulfill by everyone but the newest (or laziest) players.

I think that this would be both easyish to understand and in line with current game mechanics. Perfect temp reduces hunger and increases fertility. Yum gives bonus nutrition and could help with fertility too. As an intended side-effect, this might also make the average new player consider yum earlier than they currently do.

What do you think?

Ellesanna · 2018-12-02 14:29:22

Something definitely needs to be done about population booms and there needs to be a more humane solution than just abandoning your children or killing mothers. Societies in real life didn't have to regularly go on mass murdering sprees to act as population control for their people. This proposed solution could help decrease the likelihood of being born to noob mothers and act as a sort of birth control- which is nice but could also hurt eves who start off with a limited variety of food. Being an eve is already difficult enough and my concern is that putting that extra pressure of diversity in food might make it so even competent players would fail to produce a daughter to continue their lineage as they were rushing to build an eve camp.
Other than that, this seems like a viable solution. There needs to be some sort of birth control in OHOL that makes it so you can have multiple daughters raise a limited amount of kids instead of having to kill your own kids at birth. As with all birth control, none of it is absolute and it still fails but having SOMETHING that lessens your chance of being bombarded with kids and starving out your line due to food shortages and having to rush to hurriedly convince mothers to abandon their kids would greatly improve the OHOL experience. No one likes having to abandon their children and no one likes being abandoned.

wolfgang · 2018-12-02 16:22:49

Ellesanna wrote:

which is nice but could also hurt eves who start off with a limited variety of food. Being an eve is already difficult enough and my concern is that putting that extra pressure of diversity in food might make it so even competent players would fail to produce a daughter to continue their lineage as they were rushing to build an eve camp.

Ah yea I was reading his post and though it sounded great, but I def forgot about eves and how diverse food would be pretty hard for them to keep up with. Since eves are a different type of spawn though and the game knows you are an eve, could the eves simply be excluded from the restriction? Their daughters would need to manage the yum for a good number of children but the eve herself could pop as many as possible still to get things started.

thundersen · 2018-12-02 17:22:31

Ellesanna wrote:

which is nice but could also hurt eves who start off with a limited variety of food. Being an eve is already difficult enough and my concern is that putting that extra pressure of diversity in food might make it so even competent players would fail to produce a daughter to continue their lineage as they were rushing to build an eve camp.

Good point. Balancing between reducing fertility for berry munchers and not making it harder for Eves is crucial.

But I'm not sure it would be that bad for Eves. You would have reduced fertility in the very beginning, until you get your first Yum. I'd be fine with 50% less kids in the very beginning when I'm running around looking for a spot.

After that I'm not so sure. A single point of yum should be very easy to gain with wild food or the berry/bowl combo a bit later. And you could actively avoid it, if you don't want more kids, because maybe you already have two teenage daughters and food is still low. It might be too easy to forget though.

Starknight_One · 2018-12-02 17:29:40

wolfgang wrote:

Ellesanna wrote:
which is nice but could also hurt eves who start off with a limited variety of food. Being an eve is already difficult enough and my concern is that putting that extra pressure of diversity in food might make it so even competent players would fail to produce a daughter to continue their lineage as they were rushing to build an eve camp.
Ah yea I was reading his post and though it sounded great, but I def forgot about eves and how diverse food would be pretty hard for them to keep up with. Since eves are a different type of spawn though and the game knows you are an eve, could the eves simply be excluded from the restriction? Their daughters would need to manage the yum for a good number of children but the eve herself could pop as many as possible still to get things started.

It's not hard to obtain a +1 or +2 Yum bonus as an Eve, barring certain circumstances. And if you're in those, it's probably not a good time for kids anyway. So factoring in Yum (as well as temperature) to determine motherhood choice shouldn't be that hard. It also makes sense; nutrition plays a big part in successful pregnancies. [Yes, we don't have pregnancy in the game... work with me.]

Yum goes up to +5, right? Add a 5% weight factor for each point of the potential mother's Yum score. That should result in more kids going to mothers in good circumstances without destroying the chances of Eves getting kids, and Eves who do a bit of work can improve their chances of having kids. (Although the way some of these players eat, I dunno...)

Last edited by Starknight_One (2018-12-02 17:30:41)

lionon · 2018-12-02 18:19:59

Kinda related to floofy's suggestion:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4538

Ellesanna · 2018-12-02 18:55:31

thundersen wrote:

Good point. Balancing between reducing fertility for berry munchers and not making it harder for Eves is crucial.
But I'm not sure it would be that bad for Eves. You would have reduced fertility in the very beginning, until you get your first Yum. I'd be fine with 50% less kids in the very beginning when I'm running around looking for a spot.
After that I'm not so sure. A single point of yum should be very easy to gain with wild food or the berry/bowl combo a bit later. And you could actively avoid it, if you don't want more kids, because maybe you already have two teenage daughters and food is still low. It might be too easy to forget though.

That is definitely looking at it in a different light. I agree that this system might actually help eves in that they don't end up with loads of children before they're ready. It would certainly help me with my eve runs if I had more control over when and where I started producing children. Its just that even as an eve you have to multi-task so many different things and keep track of everything that adding another to keep an eye on makes it easy to forget it which is my main concern. I know I often forget to get enough milkweed for rabbit traps when I first start up a base and then have to run around for five minutes looking for it.
But with kids- when you have a fertility window of 14 to 40- you only have about a half hour where you can produce kids starting right away when you spawn in as an eve. You spend most of your fertility time trying to set up base and get it to the point you're farming or have a lot of food in storage for when you can actually keep your children alive to maturity. Chances are, you won't reach this point until you're thirty-something. This leaves a less then ten minute window to produce children- more specifically a daughter and a spare to carry on your lineage. Which is why I still stand by my stance that this system wouldn't help eves in a long run as even when you have a plenty of food around your children often die and if you only birth 2-3 kids your chances for producing a competent daughter drops dramatically in comparison to popping out twelve. The best chance for an eve to succeed in starting up a village is birthing loads of kids over the whole of their lifetime while still getting stuff done and having enough food around for the competent kids to find and hoping that at least some of your children survive to adulthood, know how to proceed in the tech tree, and have the ability to continue your line.

Last edited by Ellesanna (2018-12-02 18:59:26)

Floofy · 2018-12-02 21:13:06

lionon wrote:

Kinda related to floofy's suggestion:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4538

Thanks

But i dislike this idea because it makes it much harder for eves or primitive villages to get kids, and much easier for very advanced towns to get even more babies. I feel like if this change was made, it would make it much harder for big towns to collaspe, and much harder for new villages to make it.

I think if we're gonna manipulate how babies are born, the spirit should be fairness (everyone gets decent chance at childrens) and also logic (mothers who dont want childs shouldn't be spammed of them).

thundersen · 2018-12-02 22:29:32

Hmm, I don't know, if the two ideas are that closely related. Floofy wants to balance out the number of children between mums. The problem he wants to solve is the perceived unfairness of not getting daughters when other women do. My goal is to reduce the likelihood of population explosion.

Floofy wrote:

lionon wrote:
Kinda related to floofy's suggestion:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4538
But i dislike this idea because it makes it much harder for eves or primitive villages to get kids, and much easier for very advanced towns to get even more babies. I feel like if this change was made, it would make it much harder for big towns to collaspe, and much harder for new villages to make it.

Would you care to elaborate? Maybe I'm missing something. Much harder? How hard is it to get one Yum point for the average player? Why would advanced towns get even more babies? Advanced towns are the ideal biotope for the kind of baby spammer who would get fewer children with my suggestion. Mind you, gobbling down mutton pie after mutton pie doesn't give Yum either.

lionon · 2018-12-03 07:31:27

While in practice my guess is towns have less yum, because everybody eats mutton pies in good towns or domestic berries in bad villages... theoretically towns have a much higher potential to go crazy about yum bonus taking in all the babies.

pein · 2018-12-03 08:33:26

i dotn yum chain too often
or i do easy chains then repeat

like we got like 6-8 food available i chain it
the original idea was to punish berry eaters, but not with negative yum, its never a good answer, they would still eat it if they starve and don't knwo anything else
so yum is good to have, as it gives some variation
but for this idea to be better i would advise two things:

bigger hunger bar and some time to convert food into ''energy''
maybe starving would remove max food bars fast, and incrementally more and more, so you would kinda get injured, but not dead, but would affect your later game if at any point you starve or you eat low nutrition food and didn't yet consumed

hard cap at 12 the yum bonus. its just impossible to have +36 even in huge cities, now you could replace wild food with processed ones and reach yum 12, which could give higher chance of baby birth
i guess some would activate and some would hate it, so it should be a button to use it
kind of like a spell reload which i guess jason wouldn't like, but we already got curses and yum and it wuld be nice to have a game mechanic
also would make cities more organized to help people reach higher yums, by building 3x4 yum tables, the rewards could bedifferent, like spawn a new eve if 3 people reach high yum or one reaches it 3 times, not sure

but the basic idea is nice just has some issues with force feeding and consent from the players

lionon · 2018-12-03 09:09:05

pein wrote:

bigger hunger bar and some time to convert food into ''energy''
maybe starving would remove max food bars fast, and incrementally more and more, so you would kinda get injured, but not dead, but would affect your later game if at any point you starve or you eat low nutrition food and didn't yet consumed

Basically very similar to what I've just recently suggested, only with way more babbling

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4681

thundersen · 2018-12-03 12:23:04

lionon wrote:

While in practice my guess is towns have less yum, because everybody eats mutton pies in good towns or domestic berries in bad villages... theoretically towns have a much higher potential to go crazy about yum bonus taking in all the babies.

Exactly. In one of my recent lives my mum managed to wolf down two entire mutton pies while raising me. And this was a smallish village with a tiny pen and not much food. That is just painful to watch. I would love to see individual food statistics in the family tree. I'm sure we'd be amazed about the amounts of food that some players annihilate in a single lifetime.

I like the Yum mechanic and would appreciate another incentive for using it. In towns I do simple chains too, like pein explained. That would be more than enough for my idea to work.

At this point I don't see Jason doing a major rework of the food and temp mechanics. He seems focused on expanding content and balancing what is there, which seems more than reasonable to me given that the game is out on Steam and the player base has grown quite a bit. It's a one man operation after all. So while I find many of the suggestions out there, like pein's here, interesting, I'm afraid it's not realistic for them to be implemented. That's why I'd vote for a simpler mechanic that is more in line with what's already there.

Last edited by thundersen (2018-12-03 12:24:23)

Tarr · 2018-12-03 13:00:57

The issue with yum is that it's not exactly what I call rewarding vs the amount of effort put into making large yum chains. Lets look at the amount of food we're going to need to survive for the hour.

Naked in Neutral 4.8 sec/pip 746 pip/hr
Naked in Desert. 8.3 sec/pip 433 pip/hr
Naked in Jungle 20.3 sec/pip 178 pip/hr

If you fall into the first category you should be leaving town for better temperature or be gearing every single person possible up with clothes. This is probably the only one that actually needs you to yum chain since you're burning through food at a rather alarming rate. At our highest/most efficient raw value you food (whole milk) You're going to need 5.33 buckets of milk per person to survive for the hour which isn't awful but that's a lot of milking you'll be doing.

In the second category is where I feel like yumming is at your own discretion. We're going to need a total of 3.09 buckets of milk per person. Without any sort of milking practice I can regularly squeeze out about 3-4 buckets of whole milk in my milking window which is all someone needs per hours to live.

Third category is basically raw food value > yum. While yum will prevent you from having to eat regularly the amount of effort needed to do so isn't worth it. Each person only ends up needing 1.27 buckets of whole milk per hour.

Now why does any of this matter to your suggestion? Basically yum in its current form isn't a very good system and shouldn't be reinforced with the backing of your ability to have kids based on doing it. If anything yum will be much more favorable when Jason decides to pull off the training wheels of the invisible food bonus (each food item on the official servers receive an invisible +2 value added to their actual value).

lionon · 2018-12-03 13:07:25

Whole milk is a category nobody understands. I never seen it in game. Please express it in terms of berries and/or mutton pies. These are the "bathtub" and "football fields" public measurements of OHOL

thundersen · 2018-12-03 13:30:16

Tarr wrote:

Now why does any of this matter to your suggestion? Basically yum in its current form isn't a very good system and shouldn't be reinforced with the backing of your ability to have kids based on doing it. If anything yum will be much more favorable when Jason decides to pull off the training wheels of the invisible food bonus (each food item on the official servers receive an invisible +2 value added to their actual value).

Thanks, tarr! I agree with everything you said - except the conclusion. I think the Yum mechanic is cool, it's just that some nutrition values are not properly balanced. That's a different story and should be addressed. Whole milk is ridiculous (albeit strangely irrelevant in practice).

The point here remains to reduce the number of babies that inconsiderate mothers can spam. I suggested Yum, because it's in the game, I like the mechanic, and making fertility dependent on your diet seems better than anything else I can think of. If anybody can come up with other ideas than using Yum, I'd love to hear them.

Tarr · 2018-12-03 13:33:23

Whole milk is 140 food per bucket so in more simple terms per person you will be needing

Naked in Neutral 4.8 sec/pip 746 pip/hr
- 149.2 berries/hr
- 26.64 bowls of stew/hr
- 12.4333 mutton pies/hr
-3.008 turkeys/hr

Naked in Desert. 8.3 sec/pip 433 pip/hr
- 86.6 berries/hr
- 15.46 bowls of stew/hr
- 7.22 mutton pies/hr
- 1.75 turkeys/hr

Naked in Jungle 20.3 sec/pip 178 pip/hr
- 35.6 berries/hr
- 6.36 bowls of stew/hr
- 2.97 mutton pies/hr
- 0.71 turkeys/hr

The point of whole milk in the original example is that it's the highest renewable food source we can make (140 pips per bucket). Also remember each of these is implying you stay within your biome your whole life and that you eat efficiently. It's also a pretty important reminder on why you should never be setting up your camp in a majority neutral biome no matter what is around it.

Gederian · 2018-12-03 19:21:43

Just craft a coat hanger. When you're holding it you can't have babies.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2018-12-02 13:49:55

Idea: Make Yum affect fertility

#2 2018-12-02 14:29:22

Re: Idea: Make Yum affect fertility

#3 2018-12-02 16:22:49

Re: Idea: Make Yum affect fertility

#4 2018-12-02 17:22:31

Re: Idea: Make Yum affect fertility

#5 2018-12-02 17:29:40

Re: Idea: Make Yum affect fertility

#6 2018-12-02 18:19:59

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#7 2018-12-02 18:55:31

Re: Idea: Make Yum affect fertility

#8 2018-12-02 21:13:06

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#9 2018-12-02 22:29:32

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#10 2018-12-03 07:31:27

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#11 2018-12-03 08:33:26

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#12 2018-12-03 09:09:05

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#13 2018-12-03 12:23:04

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#14 2018-12-03 13:00:57

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#15 2018-12-03 13:07:25

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#16 2018-12-03 13:30:16

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