A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

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EchoMan
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby EchoMan » Mon Jan 29, 2018 9:33 am

Tiamo wrote:This is a fair point. I have noticed new characters sometimes have difficulty finding out how to build up a basic set of resources, tools and machines, unless helped by older characters. Environmental variations may make things even more confusing for them.
A well-written, visibly presented 'beginners guide' may help out on this and other learning curve issues.


We do have articles on the wiki explaining some of this. Anyone could sign up for a wiki account and add to the information there.

http://wiki.cantr.net/index.php/Your_First_Cantr_Day
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cutecuddlydirewolf
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby cutecuddlydirewolf » Mon Feb 05, 2018 11:22 pm

Just thought I'd throw my two cents in here.

The way I see it, the world of Cantr has been stuck in a sort of "Golden Age" for a long time. Resources are plentiful, there are systems in place that make it very hard to be a criminal, and there are a multitude of wealthy and established towns. Most places are a wealth of culture and prosperity, and unless you happen to spawn in the middle of nowhere, it's very unlikely that any character will face real hardship.

Is it pleasant? Yes. But it's also somewhat boring, to put it bluntly. Like some others have said on this thread- I personally want to see war. I want to see a struggle for resources and wealth, I want to see some tension. Disasters would be fantastic in that regard.

It would also shake up the current exchange rate for resources. There really isn't any haggling in Cantr- it's a straight ratio of grams of material to days of work. The value of the material itself is rarely, if ever, taken into account. If some resources are sparse, that could change.
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Jos Elkink
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby Jos Elkink » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:38 am

I do agree, to some extent.

See also my comments here.

Rather than drought, could more fierce animals in parts of the game be a way forward? To reduce the size of inhabitable land and therefore increase competition for resources?

GAB and RD are in discussion how scarcity can be increased, and considering a range of options.
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Rmak
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby Rmak » Tue Feb 06, 2018 9:25 am

Unleash the kraken.
Quote Wolfsong:
They aren't playing children; they are playing mentally ill people.

:twisted: :roll: :lol: 8) :twisted:
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PaintedbyRoses
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby PaintedbyRoses » Tue Feb 06, 2018 10:18 am

I hate to see conditions become more unsurvivable for people who are spawned into undeveloped or deserted areas and want to try to make their homes there. Already, they often can't survive because they can't make sufficient shields for protection from the animals.

My favorite thing to do with the characters I have, so far, has been the struggle to achieve the basics of life. My least favorite is being spawned into a noisy town where everything is, literally, handed to my character.

Please don't make it so the only way for characters to survive is to move to an already established community. With so much left over stuff and so many stockpiled resources, characters can just hang out and work a little without a reason to accomplish much. I think this leads to boredom on the part of the players.

I would rather see everything deteriorate over time and not be fixable - even things that do not decay much in RL, like gold and diamonds. Everything should decay in Cantr to reduce the current overabundance of material goods and resources, IMO. In fact, the more valuable the item, the faster it should decay.

Conflict is an essential part of every good story and Cantr is, basically, a story. From what I can glean about Cantr's past, the best times were when groups were in conflict with each other over resources and there were factions and tribes and plots and wars. There are no conflicts now, that I can see. Making animals attack poor newspawns even more in lonely areas is not going to create any group conflict. Having most of the important resources, like hematite mines gradually stop producing while existing iron and steel items are falling apart...now that's gonna cause some problems. Forests could also start to disappear due to over cutting. New trees could grow but would have to reach a certain age or size before they could be cut.

I'm sure there are factors I don't know enough to consider but, as in RL, I'm contributing my two-cents worth of opinion, anyway.

Thanks for making Cantr!!
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EchoMan
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby EchoMan » Tue Feb 06, 2018 11:08 am

PaintedbyRoses wrote:I hate to see conditions become more unsurvivable for people who are spawned into undeveloped or deserted areas and want to try to make their homes there. Already, they often can't survive because they can't make sufficient shields for protection from the animals.

This fact was one of the reasons for starting the talks in staff that Jos mentioned above. I have spawned a few chars (more or less for testing survivability) in a small language group, and it was extremely challenging for half of them even to survive their first time. One of them probably set a record in dying from animal attacks in just over two days time.

PaintedbyRoses wrote:My favorite thing to do with the characters I have, so far, has been the struggle to achieve the basics of life. My least favorite is being spawned into a noisy town where everything is, literally, handed to my character.
Please don't make it so the only way for characters to survive is to move to an already established community. With so much left over stuff and so many stockpiled resources, characters can just hang out and work a little without a reason to accomplish much. I think this leads to boredom on the part of the players.

It has been the intention of the game developers (at least during the last few years) to address this, by making new things to create and use resources on. There is very little effort involved in surviving in a large language group and town at the moment. We would like this to change, but not too drastically of course. The idea of changing animal migration and feriosity could perhaps be part of making things a little less easy in such areas, but then we also need to make sure the lone newspawns in remote areas doesn't get trampled to death their first day.

PaintedbyRoses wrote:I would rather see everything deteriorate over time and not be fixable - even things that do not decay much in RL, like gold and diamonds. Everything should decay in Cantr to reduce the current overabundance of material goods and resources, IMO. In fact, the more valuable the item, the faster it should decay.

Different type of rot and decay is also on the table, being discussed. Building and vehicle maintenance for more advanced buildings and vehicles. Decay for locks that isn't used (passed through) for a very long time. More maintenance type projects that would require resources and/or man-hours. These things are very loosely discussed, nothing more than brainstorming yet though.

PaintedbyRoses wrote:Conflict is an essential part of every good story and Cantr is, basically, a story. From what I can glean about Cantr's past, the best times were when groups were in conflict with each other over resources and there were factions and tribes and plots and wars. There are no conflicts now, that I can see. Making animals attack poor newspawns even more in lonely areas is not going to create any group conflict. Having most of the important resources, like hematite mines gradually stop producing while existing iron and steel items are falling apart...now that's gonna cause some problems. Forests could also start to disappear due to over cutting. New trees could grow but would have to reach a certain age or size before they could be cut.

For the English region, things seem to have settled mostly. There are other language groups where there still is conflict, and war over regions and such. But they are fewer nowadays, perhaps as a result from a dwindling player base, and the fact that most towns have everything in abundance. If we address some of the things above, perhaps once again this will spark more conflict over resource locations and so on.
PaintedbyRoses wrote:I'm sure there are factors I don't know enough to consider but, as in RL, I'm contributing my two-cents worth of opinion, anyway.

Thanks for making Cantr!!

I am sure too. :) Please send an application to join the Resource Department if you would like to put your $0.02 where it could be of better use (though these discussions are also valuable), but in the end, if there are no people involved in staff, there will be no change.

You're welcome, and thanks for playing. :)
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Tiamo
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby Tiamo » Tue Feb 06, 2018 12:32 pm

PaintedbyRoses wrote:...Having most of the important resources, like hematite mines gradually stop producing while existing iron and steel items are falling apart...now that's gonna cause some problems. Forests could also start to disappear due to over cutting. New trees could grow but would have to reach a certain age or size before they could be cut...

This is an interesting idea.
Overharvesting plant resources would lead to a diminishing vegetation, a bit like overhunting leads to less animals. No or low harvesting would make the location recover over time. Overharvested resources give a lower harvesting output: the numbers in the wiki will thus be a maximum rather than a normal amount.
Overmining mineral resources would after a while lead to scarcity and in the end to depletion. For being able to gather the resource at full level again on that location it would be necessary to do a resource search (with a chance of failing, of course).

An important advantage of this would be that it hurts well populated areas the most, unlike many other proposed changes.
It would also create temporary shortages of resources where they are needed/used the most, hopefully leading to more trade and/or resource hauling.
A third effect would be (local) variations in DOW yield, creating a less predictable value for resources.

I like it!
I think ...
Millhouse
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby Millhouse » Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:49 pm

I've pretty much stayed out of this debate but on that last point, maybe a way to implement that would be to make resource slots a bit more flexible. Maybe something similar to harvesting animal products. Resource slot availbility could be either low or high or somewhere in between and would gradually increase over time.
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PaintedbyRoses
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby PaintedbyRoses » Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:38 am

Millhouse wrote:Resource slot availbility could be either low or high or somewhere in between and would gradually increase over time.


Don't you mean "decrease" over time? That's generally what happens to resources. Maybe some way of prospecting for buried resources could be developed so that new deposits would occasionally be discovered and then a new mine would open.

Hey! What would be awesome is, if all appropriate resources were found inside a mine. The mine would have to be discovered and then created by blasting a hole. Then it would need to be framed in with wood and nails (like building a wooden room) and, periodically, additional shoring up would have to be done which would look like adding an additional room. Rather than being a resource slot, the mine would be like a building which could hold only a certain number of minors who would be inside and isolated from the outside world. Occasionally, a shaft would collapse and kill a few characters. Eventually, the mine would run out of the resource.

That wouldn't be very hard to program, would it?
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Millhouse
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby Millhouse » Wed Feb 07, 2018 3:40 am

No, I meant increase over time. The decreases would be caused by resource gathering. So let's say that five people are gathering resources non-stop for RL weeks it would chip away at available resource slots until there weren't any slots left. They'd have to wait for a while for the slots to fill back up before gathering again.

Edit: It could also be just a completely different mechanic not tied to resource slots. Call it "resouce availability" and give it a progress bar. The bar reaches zero and no resource gathering can occur until the bar is filled up again.
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Marlin
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby Marlin » Wed Feb 07, 2018 6:54 am

Renewable resources could work alongside animals, has this been said already?

As the small bird population increases, available wheat decreases.

But then hawks arrive, and the bird population starts to go down, but the hawks go up exponentially.

Eventually the birds die out, hawks move on, wheat returns.

It should help keep things balanced in a more natural way?

Finite resources could be exactly that.
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Chris
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby Chris » Fri Feb 09, 2018 1:39 am

Trade isn't going to flourish because of some little tweak, or twenty little tweaks. It won't flourish, period. The people are gone. The few who remain are spread out over way too much space.

Thanks to Greek and other development staff, the game has become much better technically than it ever was. But it's still a dinosaur. The world has changed, and people have moved on.

The best thing to do would be to plan a grand finale, a spectacular end. Give us some closure, and then put a merciful end to the game.
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PaintedbyRoses
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby PaintedbyRoses » Fri Feb 09, 2018 1:53 am

Cantr sings a Hamilton show tune:

You’ll be back, soon you’ll see
You’ll remember you belong to me
You’ll be back, time will tell
You’ll remember that I served you well
Oceans rise, empires fall
We have seen each other through it all
And when push comes to shove
I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKFN-aqPJH8
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EchoMan
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby EchoMan » Fri Feb 09, 2018 6:42 am

Chris wrote:Trade isn't going to flourish because of some little tweak, or twenty little tweaks. It won't flourish, period. The people are gone. The few who remain are spread out over way too much space.

Thanks to Greek and other development staff, the game has become much better technically than it ever was. But it's still a dinosaur. The world has changed, and people have moved on.

The best thing to do would be to plan a grand finale, a spectacular end. Give us some closure, and then put a merciful end to the game.

Who hurt you? Tell me and I'll give them a good whoppin' with my waster. :D Just yesterday three of my chars were involved in some serious trading.
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PaintedbyRoses
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Re: A Dynamic Economy - Drought, etc.

Postby PaintedbyRoses » Fri Feb 09, 2018 7:47 am

EchoMan wrote:Who hurt you?

What? Are you the Twitter guy from Netflix? Or should I say, ex-Twitter guy. Actually, it could have gone either way. He did get them a ship-ton of publicity (like they need it). Nighty-nite, Christmas Prince.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... 8f6c19621f
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