Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

DestinyCall · 2019-04-24 03:22:03

I've been thinking about how to stimulate trade and village diversity. I really think that a lack of regional identity is a big part of the problem. We used to have jungle towns and desert towns. They actually felt pretty different due to unique challenges of survival in these different environments. Lately, we just have grass towns and they feel very samey. In order for villages to trade, we need to have something worth trading to other people - something that our village has in abundance, but their village lacks. Currently, this is rarely the case, because all villages are alike. They all need the same things and have access to the same things. I'd like to change that.

My idea has three parts. First part - change map generation to create "hot zones" and "cold zones". Instead of the current patchwork of random biomes, deserts and jungles will always spawn close to each other and tundra always spawn close to badlands. Grasslands will always spawn next to swamp and/or prairie. Swamp and prairie will act as borders, appearing next to grasslands, badlands, or jungle, but never tundra or desert. This will create a map with regions filled with hot biomes and other regions filled with colder biomes, and the bordering zones will be the neutral biomes.

Second part - form three Eve types or "tribes" which will start with different temperature tolerances. Eves that spawn in neutral biomes will be normal. Eves that spawn in cold zones will be "cold tolerant". They will have a natural tolerance for cold that allows them to survive (and potentially thrive) even in the harshest tundra. However, they are more sensitive to warm temperatures and will lose hunger more quickly when they overheat. Deserts and mosquitoes are more deadly to them. Eves that spawn in a hot zone will be "heat tolerant." They are at home in the desert and much more sensitive to extreme colds, but even neutral temperatures are rather chilly. These temperature traits are passed on to the Eve's children, so she will want to settle in a suitable location for her lineage. Cold tribes will be better off in the chilly biomes and hot tribes will do better in the warmer biomes. Neutral tribes will tend to settle somewhere in between. Because the neutral tribe has the broadest temperature tolerance, they will be natural explorers and traders. While the cold tribe has early access to iron and sheep. And the hot tribe gains access to horses and rubber before anyone else.

Third part- the cold/hot tribes will need a revamped early tech tree to fill the gaps left by biome-exclusive items. This is the trickiest part, since it will require multiple new objects and careful consideration on the best way to implement the changes so the different villages won't just look different, but actually play differently from other tribes. There are many ways that this could be done, but I do have a few ideas for how it might be balanced.

First, I'd like to see stone tool recipes added - stone axe, stone shovel, wood wedge (for splitting rocks and logs), flint knife, etc. These crude tools will be weaker and more limited than their steel counterparts, but fill the gap until iron becomes available to tribes that settle far away from badlands.

The idea should be that cold tribes are best suited to starting villages centered around the tundra and resources available in the badlands. I'm thinking they would be hunter/fishers and their early tech tree would let them hunt seal, wolves, and start fishing quickly. Spears and spear-fishing. Faster and more portable fire production. Salted meats. Leather hides and stripes of leather to replace rope. The tundra would need new evergreen trees that produce straight shafts and spears. There should also be a way to produce cheap small fire or hot coals - flint & steel, perhaps, with pine needles as kindling/tinder. So they can cool the meat after hunting it. I'd also like to see root veggies, like the budock, and snow covered black berries added to the tundra so it is less of a food waste land. Blackberries would work similar to gooseberries, but cannot be tamed. These veggies and berries can be used to domesticate sheep. Seals should be renewable and spawn from ice holes occassionally, and there should be higher teir clothing made from cut and stacked seal hides - shoes, hats, lion cloths, so the cold tribes can gear up and get clothed without leaving the frozen north

Hot tribes would be a different kind of village. They would be desert and jungle dwellers. Water is scarce and precious. Rare ponds (oasis) would spawn in the desert and equally rare soil deposits could be found in the jungle. Large scale farming would be difficult, but travel would be easy because they would have good access to horses. Food would be relatively simple to gather during the early game from bananas in the jungle, but new options would be needed before supplies run out. I would like to see the desert developed as a rich source of minerals and precious resources. Mines for coppee, malacite, and even stones - round, flat, or large boulders. Instead of pottery, the hot tribe tech tree would make stone dishes, carved out from the plentiful stones and rocks. Copper tools, better than stone but not as good as steel. More options for migratory movement and travel - early carts using copper wood making tools, ways to tame horses without access to sheep, snakeskin hats and jackets. Buffalo hide for clothing and maybe even constructing "tent" walls for buildings.

What do you think?

SpreadDaWord · 2019-04-24 03:43:16

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Tea · 2019-04-24 04:30:16

Sounds very interesting and would give a little more variety to the game.

I would also like to see snow rabbits or foxes added that one could hunt down and make into a white-gray-ish clothing.

Those who settle in the snow biome, could dig up small amount of soil under the snow ?

DestinyCall · 2019-04-24 04:43:59

Tea wrote:

Sounds very interesting and would give a little more variety to the game.
I would also like to see snow rabbits or foxes added that one could hunt down and make into a white-gray-ish clothing.
Those who settle in the snow biome, could dig up small amount of soil under the snow ?

Yeah, snow rabbits would be awesome. White furs!

One of the interesting challenges with developing the early tech tree for desert dwellers and snow hunters would be deciding how to handle agriculture. My gut feeling is that the neutral tribe should be the farming tribe. They live in a rich green belt surrounded by wet swamps and rich soil. The tundra would be a miserable place for a farm and the desert is not much better. Jungles have lots of plant life, but the soil doesn't hold up well to intensive farming. And badlands ... well, I think the name says it all. Cold hard mountain areas are not great for farms either.

I'm thinking that the hot/cold tribes should be more migratory during their early game, rather than settling down to tend the land right away. Not sure if this is even possible in OHOL, but horse nomads running around in the desert and maybe even making occasional raids on the rich farmlands to the north would be pretty sweet. For the tundra tribe, I'm thinking they might actually domesticate sheep BEFORE they have agriculture started. Their dirt could come from composting.

The_Anabaptist · 2019-04-24 11:15:34

Most cold tribes should be fishermen and big game hunters. But without oceans and seas nor no bear or seal meat, that probably isn't going to happen.

The_Anabaptist

Peaches · 2019-04-25 04:09:49

Hell yeah, foxes or white rabbits for cold tribes
Ocelots or monkey furs for jungle tribes
Wolves and mouflon for mountain (obv) but add more wolf clothing than hat (cut with flint?)
Rabbits for prairie
Deer leather for grassland

Make wild animals afraid of fires to make villages in dangerous areas a little safer, maybe they'd avoid them at a radius

Make fishing more viable for the cold tribes to eat on (I can see berries working in the cold, maybe melting ice holes with fires to make ponds) and maybe get a sheep type or other farm animal for dung for each biome, with different needs for each. Clay aand baskets would be an issue, too. Maybe long grasses would fix that?

Last edited by Peaches (2019-04-25 04:10:57)

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-25 05:40:48

Yes, I did think about people having in-born preferences for biomes, instead of actually region-locking people. Like, some people are "at home" temperature-wise in the desert, while others are boiling there.

That would make it very inefficient for some people to go into the desert to get minerals, but much more efficient for others.

Unfortunately, these kinds of ideas still depend on a minimum viable tech tree in each region/biome/etc.

At least this hot/cold idea only requires two tech trees.

I also worry about one being slightly optimal, though, and people suiciding until the get born into the "good" one.

Booklat1 · 2019-04-25 05:49:10

this is another good idea that'd probably work best watered down i think, just making arctic/desert more viable and oil needed will buff the fuck out of these playstyles

slightly bigger and more interesting biomes is the way to go, but designing a bit for cold/hot/nomad metas gives us A LOT to play with

Portager · 2019-04-25 06:17:02

I think Jason's fears are well founded, people would likely suicide into other tribes that match whatver the meta is.

Tarr · 2019-04-25 06:21:31

Portager wrote:

I think Jason's fears are well founded, people would likely suicide into other tribes that match whatver the meta is.

I mean you aren't wrong. Would you rather just run from your mom and come back the right color to do the oil grind or be stuck doing it with some sort of negative?

It also leads to Eves killing themselves if they pop out the wrong color too if they're serious about giving their kids the best possible chance at life.

Portager · 2019-04-25 06:26:27

Tarr wrote:

Portager wrote:
I think Jason's fears are well founded, people would likely suicide into other tribes that match whatver the meta is.
I mean you aren't wrong. Would you rather just run from your mom and come back the right color to do the oil grind or be stuck doing it with some sort of negative?
It also leads to Eves killing themselves if they pop out the wrong color too if they're serious about giving their kids the best possible chance at life.

Yep, in order to implement this kind of regional based system, you would have to attain perfect balance.

Perfect balance is unattainable, Jason has said so himself.

DestinyCall · 2019-04-25 07:12:32

Perfection is unattainable, but I think it is possible to achieve a decent balance between three different factions. Many games have managed to do that much with a bit of planning and effort. I think the key would be aiming to make each tribe very good at its specialty, but none of them terrible at the most important things, so all starting locations are viable yet they each develop and play differently. The tundra hunters could be the best at fishing, hunting, and early iron production, desert dwellers would have the edge on oil and minerals for late game but have a rougher start, and the grasslands villages would have great farmers and explorers, able to grow their village quickly and travel more freely, but with their comfort zone furthest away from the richest found in the more extreme temperature zones.

Some people would inevitably form a preference for one tribe or another. Just as some people prefer to play as Eves or in Eve camps and other people want to be in advanced towns. But as long as one tribe is not serious crippled or another tribe significantly overpowered, so everyone wants (or doesn't want) to be them, it should balance itself out in the end. In a game like OHOL that is under constant development, game balance is a constantly shifting target, but it isn't impossible to achieve. When something is badly off kilter, it is usually pretty obvious that it needs to be addressed. Like when we got a bunch of fun new clothing options, but suddenly found our villages buried under a poop avalanche. The tricky part is figuring out creative ways to address balance issues that don't just end up creating even more balance issues. The solution is not to ignore game balance or give up on the idea of balancing anything ever again. A game doesn't have to be perfectly balanced to be both fun and functional. But the best games have good attention to balance so no matter what role you end up playing, you'll have an interesting and enjoyable experience. I think that should be the goal when creating the early tech trees for cold tribes and hot tribes.

DestinyCall · 2019-11-17 06:47:27

The family specializations reminded me of this idea I had back in April. The game has changed quite a bit since that time and I expect it will keep on changing. Maybe someday we will have something like this ... families living in different areas of the map, because they are better suited to live in those places. Trade developing between adjacent towns to share resources that are plentiful in one region, but rare or impossible to find in another area.

The current implementation focuses on the people - each flavor can interact with a particular region that is inaccessible to the other families. But that doesn't encourage towns to trade resources with each other. It encourages towns to trade PEOPLE with each other. Nobody wants to live in a jungle/desert/tundra. If you want something from those places, you go to that region and gather it ... then you go home. Long distance travel to and from those distant areas is encouraged because they are fixed in specific parts of the map. Most towns are built in the green zone, because it has the best resources for early game. The other zones are only useful for late game tech and inhospitable to life, so there's no reason to build there. With the inclusion of family specializations, only certain flavors (chocolate, ginger, coffee) can access these biome-locked resources. But all people live together in the same region - grass is good, even if you are a Tundra ginger or a Desert coffee. You might as well live together in the same town with Jungle chocolates so you can all benefit from each other's unique abilities.

On the upside, this does encourage distinct families to live together in the same village and share what each can gather ... but it doesn't encourage direct trade between neighboring villages. If the goal is to encourage real trade, greater regional diversity is still needed.

fug · 2019-11-17 08:36:01

Tarr wrote:

It also leads to Eves killing themselves if they pop out the wrong color too if they're serious about giving their kids the best possible chance at life.

Oh look, called that one months ago :^)

Jk Howling · 2019-11-17 08:42:50

fug wrote:

Tarr wrote:
It also leads to Eves killing themselves if they pop out the wrong color too if they're serious about giving their kids the best possible chance at life.
Oh look, called that one months ago :^)

Damnit fug, you were supposed to see how long it'd take Jason to figure out you're Tarr. You ruined it!

Maybe he didn't notice...

Saolin · 2019-11-18 17:33:35

It was already pointed out in his first string of posts on the account.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-04-24 03:22:03

Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#2 2019-04-24 03:43:16

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#3 2019-04-24 04:30:16

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#4 2019-04-24 04:43:59

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#5 2019-04-24 11:15:34

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#6 2019-04-25 04:09:49

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#7 2019-04-25 05:40:48

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#8 2019-04-25 05:49:10

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#9 2019-04-25 06:17:02

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#10 2019-04-25 06:21:31

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#11 2019-04-25 06:26:27

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#12 2019-04-25 07:12:32

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#13 2019-11-17 06:47:27

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#14 2019-11-17 08:36:01

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#15 2019-11-17 08:42:50

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

#16 2019-11-18 17:33:35

Re: Regional Diversity - Hot Tribes and Cold Tribes

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