What was broken about trade that is trying to be fixed?

[Agar]

I've lost track of the different ideas and opinions on the population gather limit issue. There's lots of ideas there, most of them good and a few not so good, and a voice for both keep it the way it is and another for take it off. But I keep coming back to the same issue.

This is supposed to promote trade.

Right? Someone can quote Jos for me on that, can't they? This was supposed to promote trade?

WHY?

Trade was fine. People traded, if they were of the mind too. You heard about them everywhere you went. Trading this for than and the other. People were trading, so why are we trying to fix it?

I personally know of only one area where trade was banished, but I've never been to the lad area, in or out of character, and don't know much of that region. There were sometimes restrictions, like Siom has it's deal with steel trade (why?) but aside from that, 99% of cantr could and did trade.

So ... if it ain't broke, why fix it?

I would really appreciate Jos or other staff members who actually know to fill us in. Keep that communication open. What was going wrong that something had to be programmed to make it better? Now if you're just guessing, SAY SO, we don't need unintentional misinformation making the issue more clouded than it currently is.

So. I now sit here and wait. I wait for the higher ups to squeeze in the time to help us help them. Come on, we're better players now from seeing the Wiki, aside from that desert beaver bit, Lets keep this new age of communication going.

What went wrong?

[wichita]

One thing that I feel is missing currently is more specialization in occupations. We don't really have dedicated farmers or cooks. In a few bigger towns you do begin to see something closer to dedicated factory workers, which is nice, but sometimes it begins to feel like manufacturing is the only viable industry in Cantr.

With the food system out of balance, there will never be a need for people to become cooks or start Inns. "The Inn" in Cantr now is just a random building name for a place where people build th exact same machines you find in the Blacksmith shop. There is a smelting furnace in my Temple for crying out loud!

So yes people trade now. They hand off goods and get goods in return. And governments in some areas do organize large scale trade, but some of believe there could be more. Another symptom of this is people complaining about it being too difficult to make a car. While it was simply too difflcult before (a large motivation of the change in smelter capacities to devalue iron), it still seems daft to me to attempt to build a car from scratch in the back yard of a four man company.

If a group of guys focuses their effort to make and sell metal, another group to make and sell tires, and another group to make and sell glass, then a group could get together and assemble vehicles. Then afterwards they all go down to the Inn and buy food. That is what I at least am thinking of when I talk of trade. More efficient and organized economics. The insular attitude is bogging down Cantr.

Another reason I believe this makes sense is the fact that there has been little difference culturally between large cities and small towns in the game. A big city operates exactly the same, there are just more people following the same strategy to survive. Maybe I am missing something, but that is how I at least have seen it.

[julie2]

Some good points, Wichita. I'd like to add that you really need a certain population density before specialisation in manufature becomes seriously viable, especially in Cantr, where distances are so huge, instantaneous communication impossible., and your workforce and clients drop dead on you far too often. It beats me why the Prog Dept atre trying to cap the poulation of large towns, just as we're beginning to attain the requisuisite density in some places.

[wichita]

Everybody seems to act like the change is hammering down on the bigger cities. They weren't targeted. The limits were assigned without considering population, it just so happens that the cities are simply over populated. That is an unfortunate side effect of it that will eventually be resolved as the cities finally begin to adjust to it and realize what it is supposed to represent. And I have actually witnessed this disccusion occuring between characters in very well roleplayed fashion, so I am once again hopeful that this will work the way it was intended.

Yes, it does take a big city for specialization to occur, and lo and behold it is the cities that are having to deal with it. The only problem is that too many people in the cities were not operating in a manner reflecting this land scarcity. In the less populated areas, life should be following the stauts quo for the most part. If their populations grow now above the limit, they will likely start to specialize.

The limits were put in place to represent land scarcity, and land is scarce in large cities where lots of people are packed into a given area of land. That is what is being simulated.

Say hypothetically, a farmer needs one acre of land to farm. A village built on twenty acres, with a population of 15, has ample room for everyone to work. A city built on twenties acres, with a population of 60, still only has enough land to support 20 farmers. This means 40 people have to find something else to do, be it trading, manufacturing, or organizing.

[creepyguyinblack]

I've had a char though, in a place where trade has already been fairly organized for some time, where he hasn't actually participated in a project, besides maybe a dragging once or twice in perhaps a decade, and gaining in "profit" along the way. But I can see this change definately bring about even more trade in cantr.

[julie2]

Say hypothetically, a farmer needs one acre of land to farm. A village built on twenty acres, with a population of 15, has ample room for everyone to work. A city built on twenties acres, with a population of 60, still only has enough land to support 20 farmers. This means 40 people have to find something else to do, be it trading, manufacturing, or organizing.

Yeah, but Cantr has certain peculariies which don't occur IRL. At a rough estimate, I'd say those towns cover something like 30,000 square kilometers on average (judging by the walking distance betwen towns) not 20 acres, so youd expect them o hold a lot more people- and you need them to hold a lot more people if we're going to seriously develop.
Also all the resources within that huge area are somehow crammed into a single indivisible "location" It's far too easy for one organisation to gain a monoply. I's far too easy for a totalitariam govenment to spring up. Throw ilimited gathering slots into that single, indivisible location, and that makes it just about necessary for a totalitarian government to sprng up,. There's no other vaguely effective way to organise that. (That's what bugs me most, The sudden loss of political diversity)

Ive said it before but it bears repeating: unlimitined resources helped to compensate for those particular shortfalls in realism, and unless the Prog Det are going to remedy those peculiarities, it's no use grafting IRL "common sense " notions onto the situation and expecrting things to work by a similar logic. They won't.

[McManus]

You know what is wrong with it? to many towns and to little people. The active players are spread to thin. Think about it.

[Ash]

"You are hungry" Hoorah for the newspawns. They have to work now, or starve to death.

[Nick]

How realistic is it that anyone can spawn anywhere and have their own plot of land, regardless of how many farmers there are in town?

Just because this staves your progress, does not mean it's a bad implementation.

Just one of the VERY NECESSARY implementations that need to happen.

[julie2]

How realistic is it that anyone can spawn anywhere and have their own plot of land, regardless of how many farmers there are in town?

Just because this staves your progress, does not mean it's a bad implementation.

You haven't thought this through Nick. I'm not the saying that the game was ever realisstic that sense, just that the one shortfall in realism serves to balance the other.

Actally, it IS realistic that in a country that size, with a population that tiny, everyone could find their own little plot if they wanted it. It's NOT realisticic that one greedy overload, or one one tiny government can very easily lay claim to the whole caboodle, and enforce that claim without moving a step beyond their own backyard. Cantr's simplicity makes that possible, but that doesn't make it desirable.You throw in resource imitatons and suddenly it becomes, not just an unfortunate side-effect of simplicity-, but the only practical way to manage things. .Governments are now forced to manage the whole "town " (which includes all surrounding farmland etcetea, remember) just as if if everyone was crammed ino one little field. There's no remotely analagous situation to that IRL (except for prison camps, surrounded by huge tracts of wasteland, perhaps).

Private ownership of some segment of that land shoud also be possible.
It shold also be possible to designate some part of that land as "common land " . It isn't. But the fact that resources were unlinimited as yet meant we didn't have to coinfront those problems before. We could act as if those things were possible, and nobody had any pressing reason to argue about it. I was hoping (and vaguely assuming) that the Prog Dept would A) allow the population to grow a bit more and B) Implement some kind of realistic land division sysem, long before they threw in the limited resource thing. I was shocked that they did it all backwards like this.
Now, this game won't be worth playing (not from my perspective) until that happens.

As for the effects on my characters- it gives most of them an "unfair advantage " if anything, because they happen to be better equipped to cope with this change than most. There's nothing to stop them growing individually rich and powerful. But that's not the point. They don't want to live in a world of ruthless dictatorships, They don't want to be either leaders or followers on those terms. One plans to bring down a ruthless dictarship, and she's goibng to lose heart when she realises that she can't do anything but replace it with another dictatatorshp under the new parameters. So shall I lose heart, come to that, because the political and social possibiliies were one of the things which really really intrigud me. I'm already beginning to feel that Cantr is a chore, because there's nothing left to look forward to, in my mind. The options are too limited, and what happens next is too predictable.


By the way, , if someone's keeping track of the reasons for players quitting , this is gonna be mine, but I'll probably be fed up of stating my case, as well as fed up of playing by then. I'm sticking with it for now, but with precious little hope.

[julie2]

I I can see this change definately bring about even more trade in cantr.

That's been said before and refuted before by various people.

People gather goods so they can eat, trade , and make stuff ,right? The resulting trade and manufacture are going to be proportional to the amount they succeed in collecting. You can't have less gathering overall and more trading instead (just individual characters switching occupation from gatherer to trader, but somebody still has to do the gathering,or there's nothing to trade) Make it harder to collect those basic resources (which this undoubtably does. People are wasting a lot of potential gathering-time waiting in line or moving to another locatoion)and trade falls proporrtionally. There's no getting round that. No way do you make more trade by making gathering less fruitful, you just make everything else that bit more frustrating. Maybe you might get more traders
emerging, but they'll be less successful, on average, because there's only so much trade to go round.

No wonder we screw things up IRL so badly if most of us can't see the logical conseqences of that kind of change, not even in in a simplified system like Cantr.

[Schme]

I could go on and on and on, but I don't have it in me, and so what I have to say means nothing. All I'm going to say is that trade is infinitly more difficult now, as I have come to realize, as is living. The age of prosperity has been killed before it begun.

Also, death to the skill system, (nobody needs skilled farmers if you can produce your own food no sweat, which made sense because before we didn't need a thousand years just to get enough food and we could concentrate on other things.) Until now, designated farmers were never usefull to a large degree. Now, barely anyone is usefull.

Hell, who cares if your good and smart enough to get ahead in life or not! That doesn't count anymore. Now what counts is staking out a harvesting spot.

Hell, never mind. You'll see for yourselves. Or maybe not.

Either way, your pulling a Great Leap Forward on us.

[Savanik]

... it still seems daft to me to attempt to build a car from scratch in the back yard of a four man company.

If a group of guys focuses their effort to make and sell metal, another group to make and sell tires, and another group to make and sell glass, then a group could get together and assemble vehicles. Then afterwards they all go down to the Inn and buy food. That is what I at least am thinking of when I talk of trade. More efficient and organized economics. The insular attitude is bogging down Cantr.

I'll agree. I've been playing the game for a couple weeks now, and it really seems like a very do-it-yourself situation, even in the large towns some of my characters spawned in with notes about helping out the newspawns. I.e., if you don't gather food yourself, you'll start starving on your first day.

That attitude really seems to carry over from day one - people think, 'well, nobody gave me food, so I'd better gather all the resources myself, build it entirely myself', and there you have it.

Savanik

[Lemon Demon]

Luckily for me, my characters have hardly been affected by this change, but that's only temporary. I have characters on the Siom, Olip, Omeo and Jalahido continents, as well as K Island. Olip and Siom are similar in that the area is gigantic. The idea that Cantr is stone age is completely false with this new implementation.

The RL farmers in Bangladesh are not cramped into one area, they're spread out across the country, barely farming enough food to feed their families. This is not due to lack of land, it's due to lack of proper farming methods. Cantr cities are being turned into cities in MEDCs (More Economically Developed Countries), where land is sparse, but that is due to people building houses, high rise flats, shopping centres and the like, not overcrowding.(that's also a problem though)

Resource gathering should have a set limit of say fourty for every area, demoted by one for every building. This is by no means perfect, and should be capped at a minimum limit of five or thereabouts. Also farmers should be given many different ways of increasing their yields. Irrigation, higher skill effects, easier tool manufacturing. Once people have had time to adjust by creating irrigated pieces of land and getting the neccesary tools, basic farmed goods should be made less nutritious. Make more cooking available easier, by creating more wood gathering areas. There are trees almost everywhere IRL, if you needed a bit of wood for cooking it wouldn't be hard to go and get a few twigs and branches to stoke a fire to cook your spuds. You could represent this by putting individual restrictions on these trees, say in Omeo you have a few trees, only one or two people could gather wood at a time.

But the way things are now, people have to rely on the kindness of others or luck that they can actually get a spot, unless the area is organised enough to have a proper government doing something to ease hunger. Otherwise, these newspawns have to sit around waiting, with nothing to do. They have no bones to make a knife to make a bagh-nakh to kill a few animals to get some meat, and even if they did, they would have no wood. I agree with my mum here, this is going to kill trade (as well as Cantrians) before people can recover. They've been forced into a depression which is going to be difficult to get out of. Diggers and drills are needed,but can't be made without the proper resources. It's going to screw up everybody. (apart from Unity in Siom, who have their very owwn harvester )

This topic is giving me a headache, and I'm probably repeating myself. Blech.

[Schme]

All this crap about trade increase and government things to do is idiotic.

How can you measure trade and government activity in this game anyway?

That's just stupid.