Sumary of thoughts about balancing the updates and long term game play

Arcurus · 2020-05-17 13:24:22

Here some ideas to the long term gameplay and water / iron mechanics, please feels welcome to share your thoughts to it!
I thinks many updates changed many thinks and need now some thoughts how to re-balance them for having the best gameplay.
This topic is meant to be a kind of summary, so that we can present it to Jason once ripened, more in detailed discussion can then be done in sub topics.

The current situation is, with the water, food, engine nerf and griefer buff its quite difficult for towns to survive longer time, also its very hard for new players to join the game and learn how to survive through yuming.

I see mainly the following problems:
1) water supply is the limited resource not iron
2) food should not be the main issue for advanced towns
3) posse / exile / engine griefing is too easy
4) biome restrictions need rebalancing / buff instead of a nerv
5) Jobs / tool use should give a buff instead of a nerv

To 1) Water buff and iron nerf - ungridding the gird
- we could buff water supply by increasing the refilling rate and amount of water you get
- we could nerf the iron by switching back before family mines and drastically reduce the amount of iron which you get out of one mine, so you need to travel further and further to collect it and make it worth for different families to fight or trade for it.

To give some more value to exploration and roads we should get rid of the grid system for iron and water. Eves can spawn by default on a not dry natural spring.

More thoughts to roads / railroads you can find here:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=9752

The effect would be:
The longer families stay on place the more far they would need to travel to get iron. Iron would not be infinite for one town, since the life span you can travel is finite. Developing / buffing roads, cars, railroads should help with that.

Limiting iron while increasing water supply would make it more slow to develop towns but as balance increased water supply would make towns in average live longer and give more time to develop road systems to bring iron from more far away.

Horses could be nerfed too, since its currently far too effective compared to other means. Nerving could be done by needing to feed the horse every X years to have speed bonus, especially with a cart. As exchange horse run away time could be buffed by doubling. its just annoying...

More about discussion about iron can be found here. Thx @Spoonwood and @Pein and all the others for describing the current situation:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=9729

Buff for the survival
to 2) Food supply would be already buffed with having more water, this could be further buffed with having seasonal food and another starving mechanic which reduces moving speed while starving but reduces also food consumption (body saves energy).

Seasonal food
Seasonal food would be in short having an different food chosen semi randomly every lets say 5 years, which would give always double then default food value (no reduction) while eaten in the season. On top of you could get one extra in your yam chain if you have eaten it at least once in this season, or otherwise loose 1 in your yam chain. This would also encourage not always to cultivate / cook the same stuff the same way and therefor help to survive dead food.

As a challenge hard seasons could be introduced like starving winter and super hot summer, which would limit food supply while increasing wild animal attacks. In short in normal times survival would be more easy, but you need to prepare when the winter comes....

More discussion about seasonal food and challenging seasons in general you can find here, thx for all who already participated in it:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=9694

Combat and healing buffs
To 3) I think switching back to one and one combat with some buffs like more hitpoints would be the best way to solve many issues with the current system.

Each wound would slow down speed X 0.8 and increase food use be 100% each. If you dont heal with a pad one wound heals every year. Since wounds are then connected to food no need for an additional logic.

The posse system could then simply be used to give more hitpoints then a pure one on one fighter for example one extra hit you can take for every one who joined your posse.

The leader update can still be valuable since it allows to organize people more easily with the order command.

Additionally exiling one could reduce his access to tools like an kid with age 3 if more strangers then allies are close.

Therefore exiling alone would help already a lot to limit the actions of an griefer drastically. This logic could be applied by default to all "strangers" / which are not allied with you and in the minority and therefore protect against stealing.

In short through exiling a king would be powerful, but not as deadly as currently where exile is more like an execution.

Engine "reapair" / recycling could be limited only to the majority leader.

buffs for the biome people
To 4) The main design idea hear would be to allow to be self sustainable in the beginning but later require more on more the need from specialists.

In short there would be no biome restrictions / nerfs, but buffs for certain races in certain bioms like:

- only half of temperature malus in your biome double in opposite biome
- movement speed of X 0.8 in opposite biomes X 1.2 in your own biome
- better resistance / immunity against moskitos for the jugle people
- if you pick one ressource from your own biome like bana there is a 80% chance to have an extra banana
- special resources like sulfur, oil, rubber... would offer very few easily accessible ressources in the beginning, but once exhausted would need a specialist from the biome

- the babel fish people would be buffed with additional horse / car speed of X 1,2

- the new exile system / see above could make it more harder for strangers to just steal things and thereofore encourage trade negotiations.

Buffs for the tool system
To 5) Instead of restricting tool use learned tools could get a buff if you mastered it, like 50% tool exhaustion, half hard work food cost etc, feel free to give further ideas.

Mastering could require to use it a lot (you know better the numbers then me, i guess better have different numbers for different tools) like lets say 30 times and top 5 tool used could be passed from generation to generation (daughters from their mother, and sons from the closest male relative).

Your profession could be added to the name you have if you / your relatives reached mastering in it.

Incarnation in an similar profession could be encouraged.

As a nerf if you use a tool which you / the generation before did not master yet, you could loose some food like 1 to 3 (of course needs to be balanced)

As effect with time different sub families could specialize and it would matter more in which sub family you are born.

Thats it for now. As said this is more an summary about how to balance the different updates from the past. Feels free to share your thoughts.

Last edited by Arcurus (2020-05-17 13:57:44)

pein · 2020-05-17 14:38:15

I had this idea of having multiple upgrades for wells and mines. It could be also linked to population, so each unique person can upgrade them once per life, and require multiple upgrades.

They would produce renewable resources instead of a limited amount. Now you got 134 bowls, 330 bowls and 41x4x10=1640 water expected
the main strategy is still the same: store in a cistern, rush through it
This is a horrible design since the first 2 steps can go organically, slowly using the water for farms, while the food has decent values
possibly on advanced well, you are able to afford some ropes
the third level is tedious and out of your control if you got the wrong skin colour
the fourth step is reversible so its a matter of time your engine gets destroyed by a troll

back before we had that town reaching the fourth level can be revived, now that is out of the question
towns reaching 3rd level would of been too much work compared to starting somewhere new

a good system would account the work of people and provide a steady income, even if its lower than now
let's say you get 4 water on the first level but every 20 minutes. that counts even with the 134 bowls in 11 hours. It won't provide enough food for people anyway.
the second level could be just 4 more, third with 8 more etc.
This would still require people to do job real-time to not lose the water.
Now comes the solution for the overproducing: other techs would use the water production to boost their own production.
An iron mine could be washed out with water to help the production, so it would use up part or all of your water production but providing more iron.

The iron could be used directly or indirectly to increase well levels and provide you with more water. So you would have a choice: ave no water at all for the next 20 minutes or have no iron for the next 20 minutes. This would put the focus on choices, work and player choices.
level 0 iron would provide a small stack of 4 like now, to make the first tools, then level 2 would provide 1 iron per 20, level 2 would give 2 per 20, level three would give 6 or something. Increasing exponentially but would need more and more water, generally, a level of 3 would use all the water from a level 3 well, level 4 use all the water from level 4, and so on. So you would have to switch left and right to increase the production.
This would make that you would have iron issues or water issues, not just water issues, and since there is a direct conversion, their prices would directly convert to each other.

Of course, it would be even better with more than 2 resources, at least 4. In strategy games, you got like crystals, gas and time, or food, wood, iron and stone, gold more advanced browser games had food, wood, stone and metals, some of them having clay or wine or silver

this can make more combinations of industries, with equal parallel systems that matter more or less throughout the game

just look at the wood system we got: you chop down a tree, you get firewood, butt logs which hopefully won't be converted into stupid shoes or burned, it takes a few seconds to chop down a forest if you got food, 20 minutes to move it all, 2 minutes to convert logs into lumber. then the trees get too far from you, and planting them is a pain, you got to be less than 30 and survive 30 minutes to water again.

the stone: you collect big rocks, flat rocks, stones, you eventually get so high distances that it doesn't even worth it
same with clay and bowls and plates are quite commonly lost or stolen and the lack of them can generally mean that even if some actions would be more profitable than others like eating carnitas and omelettes, it won't be possible without extra plates.

Quite weird that farming has timers, but other resources got instantly crafted, so really, you got to grind collecting them, and cities are good for collection, they aren't really needed for producing or converting items, like why you would need to bring butt logs in a room? or would you be able to produce more logs with better tech? no

I'm not sure how others see it, but i don't think there is value in cities, steal the engine, steal the iron and they don't worth shit. All those generations building it, all those people working, what is the reward? Look at real-world history. Roman camps turned into a city, som cities are naturally better at producing different things or better defended, or some advantage, but in most games, you advance, it means it becomes better, not worse. right now we got no value in exploring, no value in cities and enforced to produce less and less until you die.

Arcurus · 2020-05-17 17:10:27

pein wrote:

I had this idea of having multiple upgrades for wells and mines. It could be also linked to population, so each unique person can upgrade them once per life, and require multiple upgrades.
They would produce renewable resources instead of a limited amount. Now you got 134 bowls, 330 bowls and 41x4x10=1640 water expected
...

first of all thank you very much pein, you are always one of the first to reply and give great feedback!

can you explain 41x4x10? i did not look yet in detail in all the pump stuff...

i like the idea of refilling wells according to how upgraded they are.

With the iron, the idea was to make it more rare through that it is naturally exhausted with time, so you would need to build a better road and railroad system to bring it from more far away. Same is with clay and stuff. Of course the railroads should not cost more iron then they bring...

Maybe to require that iron ore is washed out would force to a decision for what to use the water.

To the buildings, yea looks like they are kind of useless currently...

Is the decay affected if inside or outside?

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2020-05-17 13:24:22

Sumary of thoughts about balancing the updates and long term game play

#2 2020-05-17 14:38:15

Re: Sumary of thoughts about balancing the updates and long term game play

#3 2020-05-17 17:10:27

Re: Sumary of thoughts about balancing the updates and long term game play

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