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#1 2019-02-17 18:21:57

Alias
Member
Registered: 2018-12-03
Posts: 70

Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

So prediction was true, who would have thought that making life without clothes and buildings harder instead of making it easier with them would make civs before this tech (like, I don't know, EVE CAMPS?) miserable.

Who could have known?

Last edited by Alias (2019-02-17 18:24:44)

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#2 2019-02-17 18:34:48

Booklat1
Member
Registered: 2018-07-21
Posts: 1,062

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

because naked women alone in the wilds should have easy lives. right.


The obvious problem of making high tech easier is that jobs become meaningless. How much more easily could we produce water? should we get atomic pumps that generate 15 buckets of water? How about clothing? Should it put us to permanently in mid temperature? Should it decrease our pip consumption rate more? give extra pips, protect from weapons and animals? And then what, this stops being a survival game?

For high tech to not be uneeded and unreasonable we need to nerf early game from time to time. Or at least add features that demand more work being done. Problem with this update is that we were never supposed to have such an easy time in hot biomes in the first place. We were always supposed to be dreadfully in risk unless with clothing/heating on, it just never worked the way that it was intended.

Last edited by Booklat1 (2019-02-17 18:35:30)

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#3 2019-02-17 18:50:48

mrbah
Member
Registered: 2019-01-15
Posts: 156

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

Booklat1 wrote:

because naked women alone in the wilds should have easy lives. right.

Because naked women should appear out of fucking nowhere, right.

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#4 2019-02-17 19:04:14

Booklat1
Member
Registered: 2018-07-21
Posts: 1,062

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

because the game is better off evolving from bacteria, right

the fact you don't realize i'm talking about designing a game state and is trying to be smart about it is sad really.
If the game is easy from the beginning and only gets easier, what is the challenge? Everything about eve runs is made for this to be hard.

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#5 2019-02-17 19:08:41

DestinyCall
Member
Registered: 2018-12-08
Posts: 4,563

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

If high tech doesn't improve on low tech in some way, then advancing up the tech tree becomes meaningless.   

The early game has a clear direction.   You must have the ability to make fire in order to make pottery.  You must have access to pottery (or alternatively waterskins which also require fire) to be able to start agriculture.  Agriculture is necessary to establish a fixed camp, since without a renewable food supply, you will quickly exhaust wild food supplies by staying in one spot.   Then the next step to advance is iron tools.    Without iron tools, you can't keep a fire going efficiently and you can't make shallow wells or dig out depleted soil pits.    After iron tools, the next step to advance your village is sheep.  With sheep (and wheat/carrots/berries) you can start to compost fresh soil so that when the nearby soil pits are all used up, you can continue to farm sustainably.   

All of these technologies unlock new and "easier" options for your village.  Ways to gain access to new resources or re-open access to depleted resources.   But once your village has sheep and a newcomen pump and an iron mine and a well-stocked bakery ... what do you do next?    What do you need to do to keep the next generation alive and well-fed?   What is the next step on the technology chain ... build a car or airplane?

I feel like the current tech tree make sense up to the point where you've made an established town with sheep, but beyond that, it kind of loses direction.   Villages are stuck in a constant cycle of composting and sheep rearing and pie making.   There's no "next step" on the tech chain.   No goal worth striving towards that will improve quality of life in the village.   It doesn't have to be a major overhaul .  It could be something as simple as adding a way to make more durable tools .... better clothes ... or new ways to make easily depleted resources that require you to invest time and energy in your generation to help save the next generation from scarcity.    We should have new ways to provide heat.   We have kerosene, but still use fires to keep warm.   We should have new ways to make clothes.   We have a loom, but we still wear rabbit hides.    We should have new ways to make processed foods.   We have steel, but we still cook in an adobe kiln and crockpots on coals, instead of using a real stove.   

These basic tasks SHOULD get easier as we advance because bigger towns have higher populations and those higher populations require more food and more clothes and greater job diversity to sustain the town.  In a little Eve camp, one person is working to establish farms and another person hunting rabbits and another person is gathering clay or iron or branches.   The population is small, but there are only a limited number of mouths to feed and a few key jobs that need to be done quickly.  In a larger village, the number of people increase, but so do the number of diverse jobs (and the number of new players or slackers/griefers).   One person might be farming wheat and another one is working on carrots and another guy is making stew.  But someone else is making carts and buckets while someone else is building a road or constructing a house or working the smithy or tending sheep.   These extra workers needs to be fed so the village can continue to grow and thrive.    Food production and clothing production should get easier or more efficient as you reach new technology levels to reward people's efforts and allow well-run towns to stabilize at a new set point.  This allows the general population to work on new jobs - like having a dedicated mechanic building cars and airplanes or a radio operator to coordinate with other large towns.   

There should be a new goal, something worth working towards and putting effort into achieving when you come into a town that has a good iron supply and a well-run bakery and a healthy sheep population.  In the current game-state, we never really get beyond "sheep town", but there's no reason why that has to be the pinnacle of useful tech advancement.

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#6 2019-02-17 19:16:18

Anandamide
Member
Registered: 2018-06-05
Posts: 142

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

mrbah wrote:
Booklat1 wrote:

because naked women alone in the wilds should have easy lives. right.

Because naked women should appear out of fucking nowhere, right.

Because this is a game and abstractions are made.

    The game needs a starting point, however illogical, which like all fictitious(using this liberally) works requires the reader,watcher, or player to at least suspend some of their disbelief in order to create the framework for the rest of the story, game, work of art. What is interesting is what follows after you suspend your disbelief. And in this case it is, what if you are a naked, fertile asexual female who awakens alone in the wilderness(***and in reality, almost no one played on even that difficulty level, because if you have lived past early childhood, its because your family or tribe took care of you***). That, once you are at that point is a very, very, difficult kind of life and so it is fair that it is very, very difficult game to play. Technology(like clothing) make life easier and more productive. In real life, clothing was very hard to obtain. In the beginning it was only stuff you could hunt and gather, and hence clothing was limited to the small animal population in your immediate vicinity. Hominids literally lived like this for over a million years, and the move to fibers from domesticated sources made more exploitable fibers for humans, but very considerable labor cost. Have you even made cordage irl? It takes time and a small amount of skill to make a small amount, and this kind of cordage is wholly unfit for any kind of textile production.

    To make a textile, you have to harvest the fibers, remove the waste products, card the fibers to make them more organized, then you must spin the thread or yarn, and then you can, weave, knit or crochet a textile. All of this was done by hand. You needed somewhere between 1:1 to 1:10 people processing fibers(cleaning and carding) to people growing and harvesting them. You needed at least one person carding to supply a hand spinner with a drop spindle, and potentially 3 or 4 for someone using a spinning wheel. You needed approximately four skilled spinners to supply someone working an unpowered hand loom. That unpowered, hand operated loom with a very skilled weaver could maybe produce one high quality scarves worth of fabric per day. Knitting a textile is slower, so it takes fewer people to supply the resources, but that means less textiles overall. In fact, it was our need for better methods of making textiles that lead to the industrial revolution.

    Jason is obviously going to add cloth clothing, since he added the loom, and even without using that, we have a number of non decaying clothing items that can be passed on forever, and supplemented with decaying items. Right now the early game solution is to club some seals. If even just you as eve, and one of your kids has one of those, your productivity and chances of survival have gone up considerably and it requires no technology.

Last edited by Anandamide (2019-02-17 19:21:04)

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#7 2019-02-17 20:09:15

DestinyCall
Member
Registered: 2018-12-08
Posts: 4,563

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

Ideally, I would like to see a technological progression with clothing that encourages advancement up the tech tree to the loom.

Raw animal hides would be a natural first step, but they should be limited by decay and finite wild game.  Eventually you have killed all the seals, harvested all the nearby wolves and mouflon.  And the hides your grandmother wore are turning to rag clothes and falling apart.   So before your village goes naked again, you need to start replacing animal hide clothing with renewable rabbit hides... or even better TANNED hides.  Tanned leather would be a nice upgrade step.  A way to convert raw skins into a more durable kind of clothing.   Beyond rabbits, there would be sheepskin and wool clothing.    Sheepskins are a domesticated replacement for wild hides.  They should decay just as fast, but offer you an easy way to clothe a growing population, if better options are unavailable.   Ideally, wool clothing should be a little warmer and more durable than rabbit.  Both would be viable early clothing options for a village, but wool should be a little better to make up for the extra costs and higher tech requirement.  Lastly, the loom should open up new clothing options (cotton?  Spun wool?) These clothes should provide even better protect or greater durability or less penalty in hot biomes to encourage people to switch from rabbit skins to cotton or whatever.   Or maybe  using the loom simply produces more wool items from the same amount of raw fleece.  The clothing is the same as before, but now it is more efficient to mass-produce wool caps and sweaters, so people don't bother with producing hides or tanned leather as much and everyone starts to wear real cloth.  You should be able to look around as a baby and tell if you are in a small village or a big town by the way people dress.

The difference between lowest teir clothing and highest teir doesn't have to be huge, but it should be noticable.   You should live longer and feel better protected if you wear the best gear.   It should provide you with a real survival benefit to dress properly, so experienced player strive for it.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-02-17 20:15:18)

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#8 2019-02-17 20:28:17

Spoonwood
Member
Registered: 2019-02-06
Posts: 4,369

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

DestinyCall wrote:

If high tech doesn't improve on low tech in some way, then advancing up the tech tree becomes meaningless.   

The early game has a clear direction.   You must have the ability to make fire in order to make pottery.  You must have access to pottery (or alternatively waterskins which also require fire) to be able to start agriculture.  Agriculture is necessary to establish a fixed camp, since without a renewable food supply, you will quickly exhaust wild food supplies by staying in one spot.   Then the next step to advance is iron tools.    Without iron tools, you can't keep a fire going efficiently and you can't make shallow wells or dig out depleted soil pits.    After iron tools, the next step to advance your village is sheep.  With sheep (and wheat/carrots/berries) you can start to compost fresh soil so that when the nearby soil pits are all used up, you can continue to farm sustainably.   

All of these technologies unlock new and "easier" options for your village.  Ways to gain access to new resources or re-open access to depleted resources.   But once your village has sheep and a newcomen pump and an iron mine and a well-stocked bakery ... what do you do next?    What do you need to do to keep the next generation alive and well-fed?   What is the next step on the technology chain ... build a car or airplane?

I feel like the current tech tree make sense up to the point where you've made an established town with sheep, but beyond that, it kind of loses direction.   Villages are stuck in a constant cycle of composting and sheep rearing and pie making.   There's no "next step" on the tech chain.   No goal worth striving towards that will improve quality of life in the village.   It doesn't have to be a major overhaul .  It could be something as simple as adding a way to make more durable tools .... better clothes ... or new ways to make easily depleted resources that require you to invest time and energy in your generation to help save the next generation from scarcity.    We should have new ways to provide heat.   We have kerosene, but still use fires to keep warm.   We should have new ways to make clothes.   We have a loom, but we still wear rabbit hides.    We should have new ways to make processed foods.   We have steel, but we still cook in an adobe kiln and crockpots on coals, instead of using a real stove.   

These basic tasks SHOULD get easier as we advance because bigger towns have higher populations and those higher populations require more food and more clothes and greater job diversity to sustain the town.  In a little Eve camp, one person is working to establish farms and another person hunting rabbits and another person is gathering clay or iron or branches.   The population is small, but there are only a limited number of mouths to feed and a few key jobs that need to be done quickly.  In a larger village, the number of people increase, but so do the number of diverse jobs (and the number of new players or slackers/griefers).   One person might be farming wheat and another one is working on carrots and another guy is making stew.  But someone else is making carts and buckets while someone else is building a road or constructing a house or working the smithy or tending sheep.   These extra workers needs to be fed so the village can continue to grow and thrive.    Food production and clothing production should get easier or more efficient as you reach new technology levels to reward people's efforts and allow well-run towns to stabilize at a new set point.  This allows the general population to work on new jobs - like having a dedicated mechanic building cars and airplanes or a radio operator to coordinate with other large towns.   

There should be a new goal, something worth working towards and putting effort into achieving when you come into a town that has a good iron supply and a well-run bakery and a healthy sheep population.  In the current game-state, we never really get beyond "sheep town", but there's no reason why that has to be the pinnacle of useful tech advancement.

Well, clothing production gets easier with sheep, though maybe you meant past that point.  Really clothing production can theoretically get harder since all of the local wolves can have gotten hunted, which suggests using a horsecart or even a car might have uses in hunting animals for clothing.  Also, food production can actually get better with technological improvement, because of the yum bonus.  Skim milk, whole milk, and buttered bread all require a bucket to make and buttered bread requires a knife also.  Sauerkraut requires a special shredder, and mangoes require a bucket of water to grow, so a good supply of water comes as desired before mango trees.  Potatoes require that a colony can spare shovel uses and if you're buildings out of stone (instead of adobe), that probably means that potatoes have to come significantly later than sheep.  Pork tacos require a good supply of kindling and someone who can spare the time to get limestone, which probably means that you might want to have a diesel water pump before thinking about those since it reduces the need for charcoal to have a good water supply.  Bean tacos/corn tortillas (the wiki isn't clear on their name) I think work the same way.

So, I do think that technological improvement can improve the food supply, because of the yum bonus.  The difficulty though lies in that you'll have to convince people like CrazyEddie who have said 'yum is a toy' to actually yum chain.


Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.

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#9 2019-02-17 20:34:43

Peremptive
Member
Registered: 2019-02-14
Posts: 199

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

This update would maybe almost work if clothes were actually helpful in keeping good temp, but they only help you keep biome temp. So clothes are completely useless towards keeping an efficient, good temp, only protect against the newly added temp shock, and only going in. So clothes do nothing about the cold - you are almost at zero temp in grasslands, there is little change in snow and you don't really have to stay there long, plus everyone knows to be afraid of snow. Clothes only protect towards the heat a bit, and when you leave the heat you should take them off or they might kill you.

How is that a reasonable way to make clothes matter? How is this keeping with any game abstraction from reality, that we have no internal temperature?

Last edited by Peremptive (2019-02-17 20:36:14)

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#10 2019-02-17 20:48:20

Spoonwood
Member
Registered: 2019-02-06
Posts: 4,369

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

Anandamide wrote:
mrbah wrote:
Booklat1 wrote:

because naked women alone in the wilds should have easy lives. right.

Because naked women should appear out of fucking nowhere, right.

Because this is a game and abstractions are made.

    The game needs a starting point, however illogical, which like all fictitious(using this liberally) works requires the reader,watcher, or player to at least suspend some of their disbelief in order to create the framework for the rest of the story, game, work of art. What is interesting is what follows after you suspend your disbelief. And in this case it is, what if you are a naked, fertile asexual female who awakens alone in the wilderness(***and in reality, almost no one played on even that difficulty level, because if you have lived past early childhood, its because your family or tribe took care of you***). That, once you are at that point is a very, very, difficult kind of life and so it is fair that it is very, very difficult game to play. Technology(like clothing) make life easier and more productive. In real life, clothing was very hard to obtain. In the beginning it was only stuff you could hunt and gather, and hence clothing was limited to the small animal population in your immediate vicinity. Hominids literally lived like this for over a million years ...

    As I understand the history of hominids comes as one living in a rainforest, including the early history of humanity.  But, now the early history of "OHOL humanity" has people avoiding jungle like the plague.  Eves were sometimes doing that before (I know I generally avoided the jungles when trying to find families as Eve Spoon... I'd lose time if I got bite and I worried about my family having mosquito bites... but I did get born to people trying the jungle, and later I tried it on a low population server), but now I expect every competent Eve will avoid the jungle as much as they can even if some small jungle patch doesn't have mosquitoes.  Suspend my disbelief?  But how do I do this when "humanity" no longer can originate from a rainforest?  And don't people still live there today well enough sometimes with long family histories (granted they don't keep records... but I would guess there is some oral knowledge of their families history)?


Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.

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#11 2019-02-17 22:34:39

Anandamide
Member
Registered: 2018-06-05
Posts: 142

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

Spoonwood wrote:
Anandamide wrote:
mrbah wrote:

Because naked women should appear out of fucking nowhere, right.

Because this is a game and abstractions are made.

    The game needs a starting point, however illogical, which like all fictitious(using this liberally) works requires the reader,watcher, or player to at least suspend some of their disbelief in order to create the framework for the rest of the story, game, work of art. What is interesting is what follows after you suspend your disbelief. And in this case it is, what if you are a naked, fertile asexual female who awakens alone in the wilderness(***and in reality, almost no one played on even that difficulty level, because if you have lived past early childhood, its because your family or tribe took care of you***). That, once you are at that point is a very, very, difficult kind of life and so it is fair that it is very, very difficult game to play. Technology(like clothing) make life easier and more productive. In real life, clothing was very hard to obtain. In the beginning it was only stuff you could hunt and gather, and hence clothing was limited to the small animal population in your immediate vicinity. Hominids literally lived like this for over a million years ...

    As I understand the history of hominids comes as one living in a rainforest, including the early history of humanity.  But, now the early history of "OHOL humanity" has people avoiding jungle like the plague.  Eves were sometimes doing that before (I know I generally avoided the jungles when trying to find families as Eve Spoon... I'd lose time if I got bite and I worried about my family having mosquito bites... but I did get born to people trying the jungle, and later I tried it on a low population server), but now I expect every competent Eve will avoid the jungle as much as they can even if some small jungle patch doesn't have mosquitoes.  Suspend my disbelief?  But how do I do this when "humanity" no longer can originate from a rainforest?  And don't people still live there today well enough sometimes with long family histories (granted they don't keep records... but I would guess there is some oral knowledge of their families history)?

Nope nope nope, hominids definitely did not evolve in the jungle. Yes a variety of primates live all over the world, including jungles. No, did our lineage originate anywhere near one. All of the tool making, bipedal hominids evolved in scrubby, Savannah grasslandy areas on the edge of more forested areas. There is no pressure for bipedalism in a Jungle, the only way to see far out is to actually climb into the trees and thats why we see mostly primates that live in the trees. The great apes can do it, but they dont exclusively because there is no point. We stood tall because we could see over the tall grass in the plains, providing advance warning of predators, and creating a more efficient gait that let us do stuff like endurance hunting. We did after evolving come to live in jungles, but that is on one of the branches of our development, not at the roots of the genus homo.

map_human_migration_yourgenome.png

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#12 2019-02-18 02:01:40

fragilityh14
Member
Registered: 2018-03-21
Posts: 556

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

Booklat1 wrote:

Problem with this update is that we were never supposed to have such an easy time in hot biomes in the first place. We were always supposed to be dreadfully in risk unless with clothing/heating on, it just never worked the way that it was intended.


THANK YOU!

people keep claiming Jason is my "god" and i support everything he does.

I ALWAYS hated being naked in the desert. It was so stupid, he shouldn't have let the situation go on nearly so long.


I'll tell you what I tell all my children: Make basket, always carry food.

Listen to your mom!

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#13 2019-02-18 20:35:15

stew
Member
Registered: 2019-02-13
Posts: 47

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

DestinyCall wrote:

All of these technologies unlock new and "easier" options for your village.  Ways to gain access to new resources or re-open access to depleted resources.   But once your village has sheep and a newcomen pump and an iron mine and a well-stocked bakery ... what do you do next?    What do you need to do to keep the next generation alive and well-fed?   What is the next step on the technology chain ... build a car or airplane?

I find this a very good point. I think the next step for a civilisation would be knowledge and organisation. Like right now there is nearly no way telling important things to future generations. Letters are a joke. We need books where we can tell more and make sketches. What if I find an ironmine but can't use it yet. Future generations will never know about it. With books and sketched maps we could tell all kind of things. But also the current organisation of bigger towns is super hard when not impossible. If you have 5-10 people its not that hard. But if you have 20+ people you lose the overview. Did our rabbithunter die? You will probably never know or even realize. In reallife you know each other and if the rabbithunter does not come back after 2 weeks you know something bad happened and you go to search him and/or send someone else to hunt rabbits. In OLOH you don't have time to know each other, its all too crowed with too much people. You can't read anything if multiple people speak.. and so on. I think knowledge organization would be the path to real civilisations...

And adding cars and airplanes is, if you ask me, just a gimmick

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#14 2019-02-18 20:56:04

Tarr
Banned
Registered: 2018-03-31
Posts: 1,596

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

stew wrote:

And adding cars and airplanes is, if you ask me, just a gimmick

Both planes and cars are incredibly useful if not OP when in the right hands. The problem with both just happens that the general public doesn't see/use them enough to allow them to be placed in the public eye without the things being stolen or lost. However, if you want to talk about gimmicks radios are fun toys but have zero uses besides entertaining yourself. The both take a huge amount of resources and time to put together the transmitter and receiver but to top it off you then need to do the same thing again in a different town (unless someone actually cares to make them.)


fug it’s Tarr.

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#15 2019-02-19 00:57:06

pein
Member
Registered: 2018-03-31
Posts: 4,337

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

problem with jason is that he doesn't add new variables as he doesn't want to add more things
health bar? no cause it would be like other games, bullshit.
so every time he adds a buff, it adds a nerf which is overcome with the buff, it isn't really a buff. and isn't really motivate people to work harder as they don't know how or they can just leach on others.
there are so many buffs which wouldn't be same category, the scale could be higher. and more steps on it.
create decaying clothing which has a minor buff, create high value clothing that is good enough without rooms.
there isn't a reason to build rooms other than standing in them, people who stand wont build the rooms. standing around with no resources is a death sentence. we could have other buffs to clothes like speed or food bar bonus, storage.
we could have other buffs to rooms like built in appliances in walls or allowing to do new things.

but the game still doesn't know if you got a room or not, temperature knows if a place is enclosed, but you got no buff for it.
oxygen not included made several rooms with several buff with a requirement of furniture in exchange for buffs to activities.
the game still doesn't know you got a city, you got separate tiles put together forming things. you could have city based chat, city based statistics like total food supply, average food drain per minute, food consumption breakdown, number of clothes made, number of clothes in city (yes, if we make clothes and a noob loses it don't punish us for it, notice us that someone died outside city)
also better way of tracking each other like smoke signals or notice us when someone is out of range/dead

you can have a+b and make different shape curves with them ranging from 0 to 1 and be complicated as counting 8x8 tiles and clothes and fires and walls and open doors
you can work 20 minutes to get clothes or get lucky and scavenge a dead person, is this really balanced?


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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#16 2019-02-19 01:41:03

breezeknight
Member
Registered: 2018-04-02
Posts: 813

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

DestinyCall wrote:

If high tech doesn't improve on low tech in some way, then advancing up the tech tree becomes meaningless.   

The early game has a clear direction.   You must have the ability to make fire in order to make pottery.  You must have access to pottery (or alternatively waterskins which also require fire) to be able to start agriculture.  Agriculture is necessary to establish a fixed camp, since without a renewable food supply, you will quickly exhaust wild food supplies by staying in one spot.   Then the next step to advance is iron tools.    Without iron tools, you can't keep a fire going efficiently and you can't make shallow wells or dig out depleted soil pits.    After iron tools, the next step to advance your village is sheep.  With sheep (and wheat/carrots/berries) you can start to compost fresh soil so that when the nearby soil pits are all used up, you can continue to farm sustainably.   

All of these technologies unlock new and "easier" options for your village.  Ways to gain access to new resources or re-open access to depleted resources.   But once your village has sheep and a newcomen pump and an iron mine and a well-stocked bakery ... what do you do next?    What do you need to do to keep the next generation alive and well-fed?   What is the next step on the technology chain ... build a car or airplane?

I feel like the current tech tree make sense up to the point where you've made an established town with sheep, but beyond that, it kind of loses direction.   Villages are stuck in a constant cycle of composting and sheep rearing and pie making.   There's no "next step" on the tech chain.   No goal worth striving towards that will improve quality of life in the village.   It doesn't have to be a major overhaul .  It could be something as simple as adding a way to make more durable tools .... better clothes ... or new ways to make easily depleted resources that require you to invest time and energy in your generation to help save the next generation from scarcity.    We should have new ways to provide heat.   We have kerosene, but still use fires to keep warm.   We should have new ways to make clothes.   We have a loom, but we still wear rabbit hides.    We should have new ways to make processed foods.   We have steel, but we still cook in an adobe kiln and crockpots on coals, instead of using a real stove.   

These basic tasks SHOULD get easier as we advance because bigger towns have higher populations and those higher populations require more food and more clothes and greater job diversity to sustain the town.  In a little Eve camp, one person is working to establish farms and another person hunting rabbits and another person is gathering clay or iron or branches.   The population is small, but there are only a limited number of mouths to feed and a few key jobs that need to be done quickly.  In a larger village, the number of people increase, but so do the number of diverse jobs (and the number of new players or slackers/griefers).   One person might be farming wheat and another one is working on carrots and another guy is making stew.  But someone else is making carts and buckets while someone else is building a road or constructing a house or working the smithy or tending sheep.   These extra workers needs to be fed so the village can continue to grow and thrive.    Food production and clothing production should get easier or more efficient as you reach new technology levels to reward people's efforts and allow well-run towns to stabilize at a new set point.  This allows the general population to work on new jobs - like having a dedicated mechanic building cars and airplanes or a radio operator to coordinate with other large towns.   

There should be a new goal, something worth working towards and putting effort into achieving when you come into a town that has a good iron supply and a well-run bakery and a healthy sheep population.  In the current game-state, we never really get beyond "sheep town", but there's no reason why that has to be the pinnacle of useful tech advancement.

that's the state i am in with OHOL atm

i've written about that already several times
the game has no deeper meaning, there is no reason to play it actually after one has learned the recipes up to newcomen pump
one can get caught in grinding, that's how i play still now & then but it's actually pretty senseless
even the family trees is just a crutch, not really a reason since everybody is random & that's a difference to RL, most of the time we don't feel connected to our kin, the frequent murder within the family is also an additional damper to feeling connected

to add meaning to the game - i suggest art
only art gives meaning to life aside of religion but since we know our god is real, so is religion pretty obsolete unless Jason includes options to communicate with him via in game prayers

art related we have in game only a tiny option to do some literature but where is music, painting, sculpture ?

also where is trade ?


& btw
life in towns is not easier
in towns the high murder rate evens out the easiness of life


& above all, the game needs some smooth working basics, so the towns stop being junk yards, the sheep pens stop being made from strange objects, milkweed gets finally replaced with some more usual kind of rope material
there are many things this game needs, i am not sure temperature overhaul was really the top priority but our god Jason is relentless

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#17 2019-02-19 04:28:38

Glassius
Member
Registered: 2018-04-22
Posts: 326

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

breezeknight, I also am facing the same problem: the direction of the game changes does not satisfy me, so I am only checking forum and updates. The main thing is, the game was supposed to be about rebuilding civilization and parenting, but now it is pure survival. There is no ingame teaching, there is no parenting, there is no trade, there is no war. All because Jason underestimates the parenthood and property laws.

Jason gave us knifes to allow people to defend their property. But knifes are limited, so a person with knife is like an armed psycho in the gun-free zone: only he is armed and everything depends on his will. While most players requested Jason to remove violence from game I asked the opposite: make shafts, hoes, axes also weapons, so fellow farmers or lumbers can defend their property! Not only some lucky guy who inherits it, or the smith. Also, in many heads dogs were thought as a property tool, because they would defend items/area from all except his owners (family?).

Without property every village is a little communistic paradise. You are not thinking about your children, about your spouse. You think only about a community. Players take a look at village, guess what is missing and go to accomplish it. Because of it, we are facing many people doing the same without unnecessarily and ruining each other work. Which results in multiple power drils, unnecesary wells and flat stones "stealing". With property, ingame communication would be more common, as people will not just take this shovel or soil. They will need to give something in exchange!

A good property system should be enough to create a family. But only made from single mother? How can she raise the kid? She should give it to nursery, so we are back at communistic paradise, where kids belongs to the village. The only save would be, if step-fathers will take a roleplay. But including males in reproduction would be even better, as it requires more ingame communication, gives males more meaning and creates more problems to solve: who should stay home? who is in charge? who should I choose? Should we try to have children, or still wait? Isn't it too late to have a kid?

The next thing is trade and war. Both will be enabled, if settlements will have some resource variety. But there is none, as biomes small and close to each other. Every settlement can easily aquire the same buch of resources. Why should we trade? Why should we start to conquer and gather their resources? Solution: make biome bigger and each able to sustain a small population. This way they could survive to the point, they will find and influence each other.

Also, a limited sources of resources would be great. Like ore veins, which could be mined for generations, clay pits, quarries, coal mines (gather and transport coal should be easier than charcoal crafting). This would make every settlement different and needing to exchange with others.

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#18 2019-02-19 04:36:07

antking:]#
Member
Registered: 2018-12-29
Posts: 579

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

Glassius wrote:

make shafts, hoes, axes also weapons, so fellow farmers or lumbers can defend their property!

The moment I read that I envisioned some guy with a crown eating a mutton pie, as a man walks up to him and says "sir the farmers are rebelling!" and then a few seconds latter, five people with straw hats, bang down the door with their shafts and charge the man with their axes! Whelp.. that how all empires end, with a peasant's revolt!


"hear how the wind begins to whisper, but now it screams at me" said ashe
"I remember it from a Life I never Lived" said Peaches
"Now Chad don't invest in Asian markets" said Chad's Mom
Herry the man who cheated death

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#19 2019-02-22 13:03:57

breezeknight
Member
Registered: 2018-04-02
Posts: 813

Re: Crazy idea: make high-tech life easier, not low-tech life harder

before we add more weapons there should be more to the everyday life

i am not against more weapons per se but the ratio between weapons & the options to do something useful in the game is meantime very off, there is simply not enough interesting stuff to do in game & so some players are just bored while murder is the most easy thing to do if you're into that kind of gameplay

the everyday life had to be rewarding
atm it is not
thus people farming were already named slaves while they actually are just constructive


& yes, before there can be trade there has to be
A) property
B) diversity in maps

i think a property system & mechanics had to go with a jobs system & mechanics
a job had to be a sort of property as well
the time in game is so short, it all blurrs to one grind fest of the same unrewarding jobs, if you're lucky then you don't get killed for it

there had to be inheritance
things had to be assigned, places had to be assigned, jobs had to be assigned
is oc an immensely complex thing but i don't see any other possibility how trade can ever be a thing in OHOL if there is no property
war is out of question as well, there has to be a reason for a war, OHOL lacks in the reason section alot


but back to the initial idea
i am here most interested in the low tech part of it

i think, progress is initiated by boredom with a convenient life loop one could repeat forever

making the low tech more varied with more options to do it differently would make the overall gameplay more interesting
i am still in favour of more basic stone tools, a stone axe & a stone knife, that would enable sheep herding early on without the necessity for iron smithing, it would also enable for a basic settlement management
stone tools should break way more easily than steel tools, they should be less efficient & thus giving more to do but they should be an option
instead of carpentry with stone tools i would suggest wicker as material, dragable wicker carts, bigger wicker boxes to store stuff, wattle fence for sheep pen

the game would become more diverse, because some players would prefer to play in a stone age village while others would prefer to go asap to steel tools, as it is now
one had a choice

& in general, the players should have a say where they spawn, if in an Eve's camp, if in a stone age village or if in a developed town with steel tools, cars, kerosine pump & all that glitz

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