Cantr II Discussion Forum

Armchair programmer time!!!

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At least for those of us that don't actually code in an armchair...

In most of the tiredness and decay threads, lots and lots of people (ok mainly me) spout off about how this or that SHOULD have been done, while bitching about how life sucks in out little corner of cantr.

Well here's your chance to play "dress up" programmer style.

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At least for those of us who don't get dressed up to program. (avoids looking at Anthony)

You know you want to say it, you want to tell them how to program their game they provide to you for free, so just come on out and say it.

Tiredness:

I wouldn't have made tirdeness a side effect of working normally. I would have made it an option to be able push one's self harder. Let's say you can gather 800g of potatoes a day, plus or minus the randomness. When you enter the amount you want to gather, there's a radio button that's titled "Work harder?" If you work harder, you could get 1200 grams of potatoes, plus or minus randomness, but you also get around 10% tiredness. When travelling, you could adjust your speed up to 150%, but over 100, you're no longer taking logical rest into your journey, so you're going to be tired when you get there.

That way tiredness is a way to put out a heroic effort. Right now, accomplishing the impossible just means it'll be part of your daily routine.

That another thing. Have NONE of you noticed the WHOLE NEW way you're getting tired? It's now progressive tiredness, so as you work, you're getting tired, rather than you finish the project and you're slammed with tiredness.

Not bad, but I would like to adjust that a bit, if it were me, of course.

I would do both. Sorta.

As you work, you build up tiredness, but it's a phantom tiredness. You don't actually work any slower, 'cause you've got a routine, you're in a groove. If you stop working or the project finishes, you get tired. Think about it. You're raking the yard, you're moving, but then the wind blows the trash can over. You have to stop and pick up all the garbage, set everything to rights. When you go back to raking, you're tired. You didn't feel tired before, but you do now, because you broke your routine, and got slammed with your phantom tiredness.

Ok, now you try.

I think that before you can ask "how should tiredness be implemented?" you should first ask "what does it aim to achieve?" In other words "why tiredness at all?"

A) I can sort of understand how it can function to prevent a handful of pirates, or sometimes even just one, from slaughtering an entire town.

But then the net effect has been to render any kind of warfare impossible. Now it will simply happen that invaders would be dragged into locked rooms, and then when they had tired themselves out trying to pick the lock, they would be dragged into other locked rooms to start again, and so on. That was how Draco was captured in DHN. The weight has swung so utterly to favor the defensive that aggressive warfare has become impossible.

Now I tend to create pacifist characters, but even being a pacifist is no fun if the possibility is absent for anybody else to be anything other than a pacifist! The possibility of conflict must exist!

B) And as for tiredness affecting production, I don't understand that at all.

What is it expected to achieve? What is the aim? Unless someone can explain to me in clear terms what they were trying to achieve - apart from making Cantr more like "The Sims" - then I can't even begin to analyze how I would have done it.

The only thing that has been taken out of agressive war is a small ground (2-3) taking on a town. What is going to have to be formed is a large ground taking on a town. Which is how it should be. I agree that the defense has been given a bit of an dvantage, but that is how it is in real life as well. Rarely does the offense win a battle unless they attack with a superior force, which means more than just superior weapons it means a greater amount of people. There is also the new skills part of the game which I like. However, I feel it should now be seen how hard people hit animals and people. Not just percentage of strength that the person attacked with and it doesn't neccesarily have to be an actual figure. Just an approximation. This could lead to only those who are skilled fighters being qualified to be a guard. For those people who feel it is unfair that their character is not able to be a guard if they want them too. That's how life works. If you suck at something you generally aren't going to pursue that lifestyle profesionally.

to add to socialologist's A and B:

C: to create a greater need for furniture and encourage people to go inside buildings more, perhaps.

I agree with the way tiredness has been approached, the prosessive amount, it being a part of everyday work as opposed to pushing yourself, and the way in which it tries to deal with 3 man armies.

Now, not having attacked anyone recently I'm going to have to speculate over how tiredness is applied: I'm assuming it's a big chunk in one go for one hit.

I feel this is wrong, and it does hinder fighting, but the solution is not to be found in tiredness, but in changing the combat system.

If you think about it, pre-tiredness it was still possible to slauhter a town with 4 men, after-tiredness it is near impossible, so where's the middle ground?

The way I see it tiredness works the best with project based events, so I think combat shouldn't be handled as if it were a single event where someone hits another, but a project where two people fight. Then tiredness becomes applied ot the project as normal, and more in keeping with the same levels for other strenuous projects, which stops 4man armies, but retains the balance of offense vs defence as soldiers don't tire out after a days fighting, but more likely after about 4 or so.

umm, what were the other complaints? I think there were some on how tools make you more tired, well personally I'd keep tiredness the same whether using tools or not, so tools retain their advantage.

Any others?

None of my characters are really thetype to get into combat, so I have a question about how it works: Does the person getting hit also get tired? Because they should. Realistically, getting bashed over the head with a pickaxe is going to affect your ability to function much more than hitting someone else with that pickaxe. (No, it won't necessarily make you tired, but since being injured doesn't seem to make you any weaker, increasing tiredness is the only halfway realistic effect available.)

And even if you aren't hit, blocking a powerful blow with a shield should wear you out a little. Right now we're seeing situations where half a town can whale on somebody with sabers, and as long as they're awake and carrying healing food they're perfectly fine with not even a scratch, while everyone else is exhausted from swinging one weapon one time.

But anyway, about general tiredness, I do understand that it's nice to encourage people to be indoors sometimes and all that, but I would have toned it down a little and made it more project-specific.

To begin with, it should accumulate more slowly and be recovered faster, but I don't even see that as the main problem.

What does bother me is that there's absolutely no way dragging a note or carving a bone needle is as tiring as burying a body or farming all day. And there's no way using a farming tool should make you more tired. If anything it should be less, especially after all the work already required to make one. To illustrate, go out in your yard and try turning up a row with a hay fork; then get down on your hands and knees and claw out an identical one with your fingers. Tell me which one is easier.

But, while we're on the subject of 'armchair programming', I'll mention that a sleep project would be nice, usable with or without furniture. While sleeping you wouldn't see any of the events around you (unless you got hit or dragged or something). It would simply be a trade-off of a few hours of boredom for a slightly faster recovery rate.

I've noticed that too - digging things up with tools seems to make you more tired - I guess tiredness must be a factor of both how much time you spend on a project and how much you get at the end - which doesn't make sense - using a 'dung fork' or shovel or whatever should make you less tired - I'd agree with that...

The one change I'd make is to reduce the amount of values used in the game. Now that there are stat bars - and not 'damage points' or 'tiredness points'. I'd have made it so that 'a man in his thirties hits you with a saber and wounds you badly' and 'a woman in her twenties hits you with a billy club. You laugh at her because it hardly did anything' (or something like that...) and I'd have made the 'percentage of strength' that you choose when hitting something a different gradient - from 'a light slap' to 'as hard as you can'.

And when starting a project, it should be defined by time now, and not a goal of how much you want to dig up...

Only important thing I would have changed is this;

Since attacking a person once per day has always been the rule, now that we have tiredness, this should be revoked. Makes it easier for assasinations, but not necessarily easier to take over a town.

Nick wrote:Only important thing I would have changed is this;

Since attacking a person once per day has always been the rule, now that we have tiredness, this should be revoked. Makes it easier for assasinations, but not necessarily easier to take over a town.

You need to rethink that proposal. Would your repeat hitting tecnique make it possible for a single person to enter a town with a crossbow, attack the King (protected by an iron shield) and kill him in seconds before the attacker loses all his strength due to tiredness? and the only way to assure you stay alive is stay behind locked doors or be awake 24/7?

As a method of balancing combat, tiredness really falls flat. If that was one of the main reasons, which I suspect it might have been, tiredness hasn't really suceeded.

I always thought the one hit a day thing was supposed to balance combat.

But if not, I'd support Nick's suggestion. I've never liked the one hit rule; it's completely unrealistic, especially for hunters.

And I don't think most people will be able to 'kill a person in seconds', unless they've got help or a really powerful weapon or something. (In which case I don't see a problem with being able to kill a person single-handedly as a reward for all the work that goes into making one, especially now that item decay will probably mean there's going to be a lot less of them soon.)

And you don't need to be awake 24/7. If you have a character that's a king or whatever and you think they could possibly be the target of an assassination, take precautions, just like you would in real life. Make sure they have protection, don't leave them standing out in the open unless you're awake, or to be really safe, make sure that the only people who have the weapons are people you can trust. I mean heck, whatever you want to say about G.W's intelligence, I don't see him sleeping on a park bench in the middle of a large city.

I know pirates might still be a problem, but characters living on coastal towns should already be taking precautions, and if not, well, that's what the 'Create New Character' button is for.

I find it sort of interesting that even though Cantr's got some very original, realistic elements that make so different from other games, almost to the point of being a genre all on it's own (at least I have a difficult time describing what sort of game it is to friends...) we still have such an RPG-like mentality about combat. Hacking a way at a person until their hitpoints are gone, insisting that things be easier on the person being attacked than the one doing the attacking, etc. But to be realistic, if we're talking about an unarmed person with no shield, they could easily be killed by two or three hits. A pointy object is a pointy object, regardless of whether it's an arrow from a primitive bow or a steel saber.

I know there of course have to be some checks in place to keep random newspawns from running amok with bone knives, but weapon strength aside, combat by it's very nature isn't meant to be "fair." It's not fair in real life either, but that's why we have these things called laws and moral codes and the like to try and keep it from getting out of hand; is there any reason why we can't do the same in-game? One of Cantr's stated aims, and the thing that originally attracted me to it before I got hopelessly addicted, is to let the players do whatever they want, forming societies and settling disputes without letting too many artificial game mechanics get in the way.

So I've always seen the heavy-handed way the game restricts combat as being sort of out of place, and though to a degree I can understand why some people would want to keep it, I still think that more than one hit a day wouldn't be that hard to adjust too. If your character decides to attack another character several times in a row, then even if they kill them, they still have to contend with the fact that that character's friends can retaliate in the same way, along with the town guards, any random person that happens to be awake, etc.

In real life, if a poor person found a weapon, it doesn't have to be a sabre but maybe a gun of some sort, they might use it for robbery but they wouldn't be likely to hit people randomly just because they have the chance, no, they would scare people with it to get what they want. If they would accidentally kill someone, they'd be traumatized, might go into shock or start vomiting. But in Cantr, there is no fear factor other than in the player's head, there is no pain other than imagined. Just as threatening to kill someone wouldn't work on most people in Cantr because they know they cannot be taken down with a single strike, and the damage can be healed in an instand if there is healing food around. As a precaution, even if the person holding a powerful weapon would be a good roleplayer, knowing that most of the others probably are not, they are forced to act irrealistically to reach the character's goals.

To change that, the system would need great adjustments. First of all, randomization. One hit can kill. Even someone with a knife can get lucky. Defending against a swordsman with no shield and weapon would be a suicide attempt, but there would be a chance to run and hide without having to necessarily leave the location, at least not by a road where you can only move linearly with no chance of escaping from followers if you're slower than them. Maybe the addition of pain and/or fear - that being hit might cause characters to start running in panic, or to stop working on projects, or to drop all they're carrying to give a thief what they're after.

I know those things are just too big. So we just gotta learn to live with the fact that no game is perfect.

Without reading all the replies in this thread, here is something I would have implemented differently:

Healing.

I would have included natural healing. I have 5 characters who are so wounded, they cannot go outside for fear of being eaten by wild animals. They cannot harvest food for themselves. They cannot harvest healing food.

Not only that, but damage seems to have the same effect as tiredness on productivity and combat. So, they are completely unable to harm the animals that are voraciously hunting them, and it takes them 2 days to collect a few grams of coconuts (2 days during which the wild animals attack them without pity).

For every day of normal productivity one might expect to work on a project, it takes them 3 or 4.

These people have all basically stayed inside for over a year now, with no chance of healing. One of them went into the woods, with a shield even, to try and collect healing fruits. In a few days, she was able to gather enough fruits to heal less than one percent, and took 66% damage in the process. Because productivity suffered (and tiredness was a factor at the time), she had to pick up existing harvest projects because there was no chance she could finish the one she had started before dying.

The healing is as broken as tiredness was. I think most people outside of the barbarian lands are just unaware of it. The animals are still winning.

I thought the one-hit-a-day rule was to give the person you're attacking a chance to notice he's being attacked and defend himself- which of coures he would have IRL if you didn't kill him with the first hit. Unless some better way is found to give people a chance to respond to an attacker before he finishes the job, and rides out of town, that surely has to stay.
It's not ideal for theat purpose, but its not ideal either having everyone awake at different times, which is the biggest and most fundamental problem with making warfare realistic. Its not easy to think of ways to work around that.

Mortaine:

One of my characters is part of an altruistic group of people who are out to collect healing food for several others (who have to stay inside because of their injuries). The relation of healing / animal attacks / tiredness is very unbalanced because this group of people can't even harvest enough healing food to make up for the animal attacks they suffer from. They were completely healthy and completely rested at the beginning and now all of them are injured and around 50% tired and unable to collect enough healing food for themselves, much less bring back any to those who need it.

Yeah, I guess this is how I would fix it:

Allow natural healing at a low rate per day. It's absurd that someone can't recover from an injury after two years of sitting around, eating just fine, resting and doing nothing else.

Increase the effectiveness of healing foods. Right now, you need several days' harvest to heal from one animal attack. Healing foods should be about 5x as effective as they are right now, and you should be able to harvest about 5x as much per day.

Do not allow injury to affect productivity/combat effectiveness as much as it does. [Since the skills system is completely opaque, I will allow that this may not work the way I think it does, but in such a case, it's pretty clear that my characters are good at absolutely nothing.]

Fix animals. If an animal attacks you, it doesn't get to attack again for 3 days. Why? Because it's too damn tired! If I get tired, why don't they? Seriously, though, the whole animal system is very broken, and when people discuss it, they talk about forming groups to go kill lions or whatnot-- but there is NOBODY who can kill these things right now, because they're all too injured. And apparently, animals are immortal unless killed, so there are no dead animals to harvest bones and materials from. We are locked into our prehistoric era.