a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Aha! Found the bug for the Empress thing.
In a flat hierarchy, it will indeed essentially count followers instead of layers. Fixing it.
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Kinrany, Mom doesn't have to choose..... babies can chose to follow their mom later, who then is following the other leader. Mom hears from higher up, and also can give orders to children.
I'm talking about the first ~15 years when the baby can't choose. Which are also more likely to be the time when the mom will want to be able to give orders.
I don't quite understand what you mean when you say that mom doesn't have to choose. Because the choice is there: follow the leader, or follow no one.
If she follows the leader, she can't broadcast to her children below 15.
If she doesn't follow the leader, she and her children won't hear the leader's broadcasts.
This isn't a trivial choice, although it's only a problem when the mom and her leader already use the system for something.
I do understand that changing how this works would make the default hierarchies have more than two layers. But I'm not sure I understand the significance.
Currently the only reason to ever care about depth is the titles, and honestly I think that's a problem with titles.
It's ridiculous that absolute majority of Supreme Empresses in the game have about 8 followers total, with one direct follower each.
Depth is just not a good metric for anything useful. It kind of characterizes the structure of the tree when combined with other knowledge, but that's it.
Having more layers may even be a bad thing when you already have 3 or 4, as suggested by this overview of this book about middle management.
The total number of followers would be more useful: for example, that's an upper bound on the number of players that will come together when ordered.
If the titles reflected the total number, then a Supreme Empress would be someone who can give orders to the whole server at once.
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In addition, if the top-tier ruler wants to have lords, ladies etc, then couldn't they just assign that themselves? "I make you lord" etc. Rewards for loyal followers, true companions of the ruler like how noble titles originated?
The system of one lord, one baron, one count, one duke, one king has no historical precedent.
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Okay, will look into that.
Do you recall if it said, "YOU NOW FOLLOW NO ONE?"
It should have, if they were your direct leader and they had no one above them.
When your leader dies it gives you a message, something like "Your leader SoAndSo has died. You have no leader."
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