I don't post here but i just had a bit of what seems to me a brainwave in my semi drunken state. Please humour me:
The so called 'decaying state of Cantr' is seemingly a constant topic of conversation on the Cantr forums, with constant asertions flying around that new rpers are unskilled and the core player base is dropping out of the game, there isn't enough scarcity in the economy and it's far to easy to produce and keep control of, and that all resources are everywhere so we need to reset the game. To varying degrees, all of these things may be true to a greater or lesser extent, but in this post I'll put forward another argument for the decline in interlocation RP that I believe is stronger than these three combined.
To put it as concisely as I can, I believe there is too much space in Cantr, and the Cantr player base is too diluted. This affects intra- and inter-loaction RP for a myriad of reasons. The most important of these is that it means a higher percentage of the playerbase has to dedicate the majority of their time to farming food, but also that everyone who wants to farm food can farm food (the limited player slots has almost no impact of these in most locations because they are too high and not dynamic; but interestingly in locations where food harvesting does have to be monitored it leads to more trade within the town and more purpose for a government). Implementing a size of a town (the town boundries) with only a limited amount of room for farming and buildings, that expands and contracts slowly along with the size of the playerbase, should see more people resorting to skilled work and trading to earn their food. It should lead to farming permits and taxes in locations with high populations, and a clear prize to RPers pooling resources for increase economies of scale in production and skill sharing. In some locations it could lead to black market trading or competing businesses, but I'll get on to arguments for the creation of these later on. If we look at the real world, we can see there is a clear step difference between small tribal nomadic communities and larger countries that comes with one thing; limited space in current locations (think of what percentage of Europe is farmland and housing compared to whats truly 'wild') and the ability for a few people to produce enough food for many more people (farming rather than foraging). If we look at the cantr world, we can see these factors occur naturally very rarely, but when and where they do, some of the most interesting political and industrial RP can happen (think Kai, Kwor, Blojt)
The second part of the argument relates not to the sizes of towns and cities, but the travel distance between them, and between 'population hubs'. In cantr, I'm sure you will have noticed, populations tend to grow up around three resources - limestone, hematite, and to a lesser extent coal. It is these three resources that combine to create iron and subsequently steel which is currently the highest tech of weapon in the game. Because of this people are naturally drawn to these resources and trade routes all flood down into towns with a few of these resources. Where all three resources occur in very close proximity to one another (either by land or sea), we see some of the larger of cantr's towns. These locations are always a pleasure to RP in, with rich cultures and political systems as well as person to person RP flourishing. Usually the difference between two 'iron hubs' is a prohibitive travel - both in number of locations from one iron hub to the other, and time spent in the tedium of the road. Although rich old people can get around this quickly, the poor and the young have no hope of the instant gratification of having some say in your home town, or making a profit and getting your hands on something of value within the first week of gameplay. A more subtle but more important impact is that resources move very slowly around the cantr world, meaning places which aren't iron hubs develop much slower if at all than those that are. Trade in cantr means bringing goods from one iron making location to the other. No other trade routes are usually open, calling for resource gathering missions instead. (see below for a solution to both of these problems). If we look at the real world, we can see that places that are smothered in iron tend to expand much more quickly than those with rare iron locations (think Europe versus north america pre sailing). If we look at cantr, we can see that some of the best interlocation RP happens when two (or more?) iron hubs are very close to each other, leading to tensions. A drastically decreased travel time between locations could be offset with a large cost of travel in food eaten or some other tax. Cars would still be an advantage to have with the same travel speeds as foot just because of their increased capacity (in fact most resource carrying vehicles were slower than foot for much of human history).
For me the interesting dynamics of cantr that are impossible to obtain in other games come from the conflicts of companies, governments, and communities. These come from tensions between resources, and from more people being forced to conduct skilled labour in exchange for food (this is an interesting flipside of the coin to the argument that civilisations became more advanced because people didn't want to farm and would rather conduct skilled work - maybe it was as population stressed the land we were forced into skilled work because there wasn't enough land to go around). Below is a small list of possible solutions that need to be discussed by the knowledgable RPers that make up the cantr forum community.
Suggested solutions:
- Remove the 'repair object' ability, but objects rot much faster than raws
- Max population size of a town (NOT STATIC - GROWS SLOWLY WITH TIME SO TRADERS CAN STILL VISIT, BUT RESOURCE GATHERING PARTIES HAVE DIFFICULTY DOING SO)
- Less distance between towns
- Less dilution of player base
- Hide option of player whisper (so more people can be in the same town without it getting increadibly annoying
- Towns with ability to create iron etc much more close (to each other) and common but
- Iron rot much higher
- People can form parties to travel in, if they are too large to enter a town they can 'force' (or even 'buy(?)') their way in (?)
Let me know what you think/if this is programmable!
