Cantr II Discussion Forum

Given the recent polls about Cantr improving or otherwise, I thought I'd produce a longer essay on current issues as I see them. While, strictly speaking, many of the issues below belong under Suggestions, I want to bring them all together so as to stress how they all contribute to those drives and motivations which cause societies to operate the way they do. The underlying theme is therefore that there are insufficient motivations driving characters, and driving characters through their players, in Cantr. I've divided what follows into (A) Entropy & Mortality; (B) Scarcity & Economy; (C) Immortality & Dynasty; (D) Hierarchy & Symbolism; (E) Conflict & Warfare; (F) Conclusion.

(A) Entropy & Mortality

(a) The Creator's First Law

"Things fall apart, The center cannot hold" Entropy is central to the way the universe functions. We are the product of that entropy in the absolute sense that our very bodies are composed of the material remains of decayed stars. And Evolution itself, the very evolution which produced us, requires death. No possibility of death equals no possiblity of evolution. In the universe we inhabit, absolutely everything is in the process of falling apart, from our own Sun right down to the smallest grain of grit. The only issue which can be debated is that of timescale. I am an agnostic, but if the universe does have a Creator, then His first Law would be something like the sentence with which I began this paragraph.

I firmly believe that almost everything in this game must decay, from weapons and tools, through houses, machines and vehicles, to resources and people themselves. Everything. The only issues are timescales and the nature of the repair process.

(b) An example: Why no currency? A failure to apply entropy

Now a brief diversion on how failures in the application of entropy lead to distorted motivations and cause Cantr to resemble so little a genuine society. Jos has expressed some surprise at the failure of programmed currency in the game. Recently I had dinner with a man who is an economist and the head of a business school. After I had described some salient features of the game to him, he paused hardly a moment and replied "Then no coinage will ever develop". The factors that lead to currency are as follows: (a) Gold, silver and gems are both scarce and also decay much more slowly than other materials; (b) Currency began merely as a way of certifying that a coin shaped and stamped in a certain way equalled a certain weight of gold or silver. This was its origin; it was only much later that populations grew to trust currencies certified by the state to have a value independent of their metal content, and such a level of trust does not exist in Cantr. If, in the game, you always know the exact weights of materials you trade and carrots decay no more quickly than gold, then "clearly carrot slices would be a far better medium of exchange than gold coins"....almost his exact words.

(c) The basis of civilization

It is also the failure of entropy which causes town leaders to pick up garbage endlessly from the ground and store it in locked rooms. It is in truth mostly garbage but somehow people see it as hoarding of the town wealth. What is wrong with us, me included? What sort of people are we? Do we live in rooms stacked high with crates of discarded soup bones and empty soda bottles? ...and dung?! Rocks and stones carefully collected from the garden and stored in the garage? Ten-years worth of potatoes in sacks in the kitchen? No. All of this stuff must decay, every single stash of collectable resource must in time "fall apart"!

And thereafter, the great battle with entropy must begin, just as it did in the late stone age (Neolithic), even before bronze was discovered. This great battle is the basis of most of what we call "civilization". Fired clay was discovered to roof houses and to produce beautiful amphorae and other methods of storage. From wine, vinegar was developed for pickling. Or else foods were stored in olive oil. Meats and fish were smoked, pickled, dried, cured in salt or - much later - tinned. Fruits were dried or - much later - sugared or bottled as jam. Sausages were cured with spices. Almost everything you eat today is the result of processes used to fight entropy in the days before bulk refrigeration: bacon, sausages, mince pies, corned beef, pasta, cheese, yoghurt, kechup, marmalade, jam... The list is endless. A significant number of these foodstuffs are produced by processes which control the rotting process itself: wine, cheese, yoghurt, beer, and so on. Going beyond this, hides were tanned, woods were waxed, machines and weapons were oiled, buildings were plastered and regularly whitewashed. In other words, our civilization is the outcome of these innovations.

The bottom line is that eveything in Cantr should decay, even indoors. The only issue is the rate of decay. Raw foods fastest, preserved or prepared foods less fast, but beyond that even other resources such as wood and metals must decay over time. Raw materials should decay faster than finished or treated materials. Slowest to decay should be materials like baked clay, glass and cast metals such as bronze. (We still have classic bronzes from ancient greece but hardly any iron weapons or tools). And not decaying at all would be silver, gold and finally diamonds - which don't decay in any case.

(d) Repairs

Many people feel that repairs are currently a problem for the game. In part this is true. Repairs don't require tools or resources, which is bad for trading and provides no further motivation for maintaining any technological level, and they seem to require too much time. This time requirement has become a drag on the game and should be replaced with a resource requirement. In part this taking too much time is due to the skills system and resulting problems, with many characters taking far longer to repair what they have. The skills system has also failed to bring about a "blacksmith" trade because the skills are too atomized. You can have a character who makes weapons expertly but repairs them poorly. This is simply nonsense. I find it ironic that Ultima Online managed to generate a better organized and even better roleplayed blacksmith trade than Cantr has managed to achieve. To bring about a blacksmithing trade you need characters who can refine and smelt ores, and then make both weapons and tools and also repair them - all of this with skill. What hits blacksmiths in Cantr in particular is the need to repair all their numerous hammers. I'm now going to suggest a few solutions:

(i) The length of time tools last, as distinct from weapons, should be doubled, and the length of time the three smithing tools last (peen hammer, set hammer and flatter) should be doubled again (ie to four times as long). This is simply a sort of short-term fix, since most sensible players have a weapon or two but numerous tools.

(ii) The length of time either weapons or tools will last can be doubled again (ie decay half as fast) by the player oiling them. The lifespan of the weapon then also shows "well oiled", "oiled" and "poorly oiled", and then nothing...so oil must be reapplied. The bonus here is that I intend the process of oiling to be instant, the penalty being that it requires application of "tool oil". This material could be made from oil or coal or rendered from some animal product - maybe bones? Discussion welcome.

(iii) However, when weapons and tools finally do need actual repair, they will then require addition of the resources which constitute them, and possibly the use of some of the tools which went to construct them in the first place. Repairing steel weapons, for example, might require a peen hammer (only) and also addition of a little steel and leather or wood. Bows would require a bowsquare, and then wood and some string, and so on. At the same time, actual repair times can now be radically reduced. Really, repairs should now never take longer than a day under any circumstances, and none of us who promoted item deterioration ever believed that repairing a crowbar should take just about forever.

What should all this achieve? Well, ideally it should reward active players who have access to high technology and a varied inventory. It should penalize sleepy old farts who preside over hick towns and do nothing to improve their circumstances. Currently it is the sleepy old farts who simply stand there all day repairing their own stuff while the more active players are being held back from better achievement. But nonetheless, let me be blunt: Deterioration must stay in the game.

In conclusion, everything in Cantr should decay over time. Weapons, tools, houses, machines, vehicles and resource piles should all decay. However, there should always be some means of slowing this process by intelligent application of technology and other resources, and the time factor should not be permitted to become overwhelming. For example, therefore, weapons, tools and machines can be oiled; houses improved and then perhaps repainted; resources can be converted into something longer-lasting. Finally, the time factor involved in maintenance should be minimal so long as it always involves application of technology and resources.

Please wait for the next part to be posted

(B) Scarcity & Economy

Economics is the premier social science and it is in essence the science of scarcity. Without scarcity there are no real markets and therefore no economics. You will have encountered limestone traders in Cantr. Have you ever encountered a "large bones" trader? No. So I welcome the restricted collecting slots as being at least an attempt to introduce scarcity into the game. But the problem is that there is no scarcity of land. Not overall. So what you now see is characters spreading out to small towns where there are still some slots available. The result has been some degree of social collapse in the game even as it used to be. This is partly insoluble due to the Cantr map being far too large, but other aspects of the problem can be dealt with as follows.

(a) Enclosure of farmland

Now, in history, the issue has been scarcity of land. You begin with a commonage which every member of a tribe uses as a place for resource gathering and later subsistence farming, then in time some of the land is turned over to more intensive agriculture - it is enclosed. But the important point is that it was almost always enclosed as private farmland. It was owned. And private ownership of great landed estates was the source of the immense power accumulated by the great patrician families who brought us the Roman Empire. Landed estates were indeed the basis of the power of almost all elites until well into the Industrial Revolution. Some exceptions were trading or banking families such as those of Venice and Florence in the later Middle Ages.

How would you do this in Cantr? Well, an enclosure would simply be a room, but rather more like an immobile bike in that you could see and hear goings-on outside. It would be lockable. And each time an enclosure is built, the commonage loses 1 collecting slot but the enclosure gains 2, or maybe even 3. It should be possible somehow to "domesticate" animals and bring them into the enclosure too. You could of course also build harvesters and various other collecting machines inside an enclosure. This would create an interesting dynamic in towns between loss of commonage and overall growth of gathering slots now held in private hands. So there is a role for refusal of permission by the towns and conflict with nascent elites. Certainly, this dynamic would mirror a bit more accurately what happened in history. Without this "privatization", the only thing which really works in Cantr is a sort of primitive communism. Indeed, I call one setup which I helped found a "Commune". Other examples have been called "Clans". Same thing, really.

(b) Urban property

Those of you who have visited New York might have seen the apartments overlooking Central Park. "Upper East Side", I believe it's called. What do they sell for? High in the millions. Now imagine that Central Park was infinitely large, and anybody but anybody could build a shack there. Even backpacking students from Europe could slap together a bit of mud and hey presto, a Central Park mud hut! What then the value of the great apartments? Right, you guessed it. In other words, I'd say there's no property market in Cantr.

Not only is there no property market, but there's utter chaos in many towns. Characters, as a rule, seek to name houses after themselves. Apart from some drive for immortality (see below), this seems to be because it provides some kind of proof of ownership. This, in turn, is because there are no addresses or even stand numbers independent of the building name, so there is no real possibility of property registration developing. So in some towns without laws restricting building, and especially where mud is used, there are now far more buildings than there are people. And yet there is little if any effort to develop property registration. Akypor is a prime example of this chaos, but there are many such.

Now, what I suggest is that there should be a limitation on the number of buildings that can be erected in a town, a limit related, more or less, as some multiple of the limits on collecting slots. But beyond this, it should be possible for new owners to change the names of buildings. To control this, they must be inside the building, have a key, and employ some time and resources on the project. However, before such a process can be considered, buildings must be assigned either a stand number or else a physical address. I'd say a street number would be prettier. Then you would need an extra database code which doesn't display, but serves to order the page.

Here would be examples, showing code and address: 1=Central Square North, 2=Central Square South, 3=Central Square East, 4=Central Square West, 5=1 Main Road, 6=2 Main Road, etc; 10=6 Main Road, 11=1 North Road, and so on. After that, 1-6 for South Road, 1-6 for East Road and 1-6 for West Road. However, many towns won't ever reach this because the limit on properties, based on some function of collecting slots, will be reached before then. So no more buildings can be built after that. Ideally, the older buildings should be given the more central addresses. Can this still be done? Does the database keep a record of when the building was built? If not, that's a pity.

The list on the page would then show street address and your business name, eg. "1 Main Road - Drojf Textile Mill - a building". You can change the building name, which is in essence the business name, but not ever the street address. So, when advertising for business or inviting people to enter your building, you would specify both your business name and the street address, so they can find it more easily, exactly as happens in the real world. In time, this function, coupled with limits on buildings, should see the development of a property market and with it a legal system of some kind. More central addresses might even become a little more valuable. This will also allow characters to deal at long last with the endless lists of abandoned incomplete buildings on the projects page. Most of these are abandoned because they have inappropriate business names.

As an alternative, it may be possible for a town to develop itself by building new streets. For example, by applying sand, stone and oil - as usual - the town can actually build "South Street", thereby opening 6 new street addresses for use. Either way, the current idea of people endlessly building new homes on an infinite commonage must stop. This has already gone far too far in many towns. For that reason, I believe houses should deteriorate over time. Not only that, but it should be possible to demolish both houses and machines.

Finally, it should be possible to improve buildings to give them a grander appearance, and also to defeat entropy, which will cause less improved buildings to deteriorate faster. So, by adding dressed stone and clay tiles to a cottage, you would get "a fine dressed-stone building with clay roof"; by adding plaster (mud and limestone), wood beams and clay tiles to a stone house you would get "a fine plastered building with clay roof", and so on. Aluminium roofs are another possibility. I'd also like to see bronze doors [copper and tin only, please] and similar, which will allow superior steel locks (see below).

In conclusion, you cannot have a property market without limiting the infinite commons. But before you can limit that, and before such a market can develop, you need to be able to change the business names. And finally, you cannot allow the business names to be changed without implementing either stand numbers or street addresses.

Please wait for the next part to be posted

(C) Immortality & Dynasty

You want to be immortal. Yes, You. You, me, everybody. We want to leave "ourselves" behind. Usually this means children because Nature has programmed us that way. That is how Evolution defeats entropy, my Creator's First Law, remember? The Creator's Second Law would be something like "Let there be replicators". So that's what we are - replicators. Now human beings are very fancy cultural replicators, so we might also - or in the alternative - want to leave behind artworks or books or buildings named after us. But on the whole, and for most people, it's children.

(a) Who plays the children? A shock.

Without children, there can't be dynasties, and without dynasties there can't really be cultural replication. Greece, Rome, Venice and Florence, Elizabethan England Bourbon France, even America, were founded by great families. Spain was unified by just one dynastic marriage of overwhelming significance - the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. We have to get this right in Cantr. Yes, I know there has been a very long discussion about babies. It has been inconclusive and has stumbled largely on the issue of trust, so difficult in Cantr because of players sleeping or losing interest. Who will play the character that the baby becomes?

What I'm going to suggest will cause howls of outrage, but I know it is the correct approach: players should be able to play the children of their own characters.

It is only then that we can implement mortality, else established and valuable players will lose interest as their prime characters die of old age. After all that effort putting together a great center of enlightenment and culture, or just plain old exploitation...and now they will lose it all? Very demotivating. But just think of the challenge, the endless vistas of the future, if they could themselves play the children who take over. But, you will say, think of the resulting collusion, the sheer horror of travelling from town to town encountering everywhere clones of the same old tyrant. Well, consider Europe in the 15th and 16th Century. There were Habsburgs all over the place: Austria and the Holy Roman Empire (ie most of Germany), Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium, many of the petty states of Italy, and so on. All related, all cousins if not brothers. Many of these were the offspring of Charles V who was in turn the son of Ferdinand and Isabella. So, instead of taking out your horror, fear and envy in the CRB thread, you would - in this case - have to act on it in game. Your horror and fear at the sight of a sea of colluding tyrants would have to translate into revolutionary fervor.

(b) Dynasty and democracy.

After all, Jos quoted Olson at us, and Olson is all about how does democracy shape up against distributive coalitions. Well, there were distributive coalitions long before there was democracy, hence the roving and sedentary bandits Olson uses as an abstract model, a sort of debate with Hobbes. Dynasty is a very very powerful thing, rooted as it is in our genetic coding. My question is, how do we simulate the power of that in the game? At the moment, "democracy" in the game is an ersatz thing, which I treat with some contempt. It is based on people being "very nice" because they aren't playing out real motivations. Now the above dynastic possibilities would certainly introduce new motivations! Yes, you say, but these will be evil! No, not evil. It's survival of the fittest, my dears, the Creator's Third Law: Let the Fittest Replicators Screw Over the Others. If you find that evil, then the universe is a very evil place. Very evil.

Democracy only arises when a powerful elite, usually itself comprising several dynastic families, overcomes the ruling tyrant. But these oligarch families have themselves been weakened by the tyranny; none is powerful enough in itself to take over. So they accept democracy as a way of mediating their interests. This happened in Ancient Greece, when two oligarchs, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, overthrew the reigning Pisistratid house. But the Pisistratids themselves had been rather more populist in outlook and had done much beforehand to strengthen the common people against the oligarchic elite, who were thereby weakened. Too weak to prevail on their own. The end product was democracy. Much the same thing in the early Roman Republic which was not a full democracy in any case. No Emperor yet, but the ruling families mediated their interests via the Senate. SPQR means "for the Senate and People of Rome" (history's most famous slogan - forget the "Q" and you can still read the initials after 2000 years!) In Britain, much the same thing. Magna Carta was signed when the nobles defeated King John without actually destroying the monarchy. The nobles were weakened, the monarchy on its knees. The result was the Great Charter. Democracy, indeed any level of political freedom at all, is something which has to be fought for against the reality of distributive coalitions. It is not something which arises out of nowhere because people are "very nice"! So a fun idea for Cantr is: How can we make Dynasty such a powerful thing that establishing Democracy in the face of it becomes a real challenge?

(c) An example: Why no banks? A failure to apply Dynasty.

This also takes us back to my earlier comments about why there are no currencies. Why are there no real banks? Banking arose in the Middle East. Our word for "bank" is Turkish in origin and our word for "cheque" probably Persian. Interestingly, the banking families in this region were often minorities such as Lebanese, Armenian or Jewish. Why? Well, such ethnicities are noted for especially strong family ties, a minority survival strategy in the circumstances. Same with the Rothschilds much later in Europe. In other words, the head of your family branch in the next town was a son, brother, cousin or suchlike. Banking only truly comes about with these intense levels of social trust, and social trust is what we cannot build up to a sufficient degree in Cantr as it currently operates. The turnover of players is too great; it is almost a given that you will visit your farflung branch only to find it abandoned and looted. For most of human history, family has been the wellspring of social trust and the source of that is ultimately rooted in our genetic coding. If you want to see banks and the like, you must follow my suggested model. The current one is too weak.

(d) Application of the idea.

It has been noted before that early in-game empires and other social structures were built up in Cantr by way of some degree of CR breachiness, and that is at least one reason why current players are battling to reproduce those feats. Now my proposal introduces a legitimised level of that - ie collusion - but it will be out in the open and subject to constraints. Babies must, of course be reasonably difficult to produce, requiring one of the more expensive resting devices that can only be built indoors for conception, a baby-making project involving two people, male and female, maybe a cot made of wickerwork to sleep in, fed milk in a milk bottle and so forth. In other words, expensive. The baby begins as an object and the player can only take over playing it as an adult after quite some number of years. Cantrians should perhaps only become fertile at thirty, etc. So there would be plenty of control. No chance of myriad pirate "mules" or newspawns breeding like rabbits.

Overall, I see such a model as essential. Yes, it seems to fly in the face of everything you've believed about the Cardinal Rule till now, but it will introduce wildly emotional new motivations into the game. Above all, it introduces an intense drive to reproduce, something that roleplay by itself sadly cannot achieve. I'm suggesting, therefore, that allowing players to play also the offspring of their own characters will simulate the intensity of this drive. You want the game woken up a bit? This will do it. And I don't see why the roleplayers should object, because relationship now becomes of critical in-game value just as it is in the real world. Indeed, it will become essential for many members of the elite, given that they will now be mortal. The motivation will now be there.

Please wait for the next part to be posted

D) Hierarchy & Symbolism

Why do we wear clothes? To keep warm? Maybe. But it's not a full explanation. The first example of human beings collecting colored ochre seems to go back to Africa about 200,000 years ago. This dates from the very borderline of us becoming fully human at all, and no sign of rock-painting yet. So what was it for? The likeliest explanation is body-painting. The drilling of shells to make beadwork is also exceptionally old. Not much protection from the weather in beads and body-paint! So, clearly, clothing was all about symbolism and the symbolic expression of both hierarchy and difference from others. That is to say, the tribe next door. Yep, warpaint.

It my very first post to this forum I suggested that clothing should be more visible. At the very least, when you whisper to someone, that otherwise-blank page should show what your character as speaker is wearing as a comparison to what the character being addressed is wearing. I felt that this would introduce a motivational factor into the wearing of clothing, but unfortunately this has never been implemented. Beyond this, we need clothing to emphasize hierarchy and regional variation. We need much more scope for symbolism, including colors and emblems. This is because such symbolism is an important social cement.

I'll give a brief example of how this might work. You scatter around the game map some materials for dyes including, red and yellow ochres, pigments from coal tar, gold, silver and cobalt (blue), and maybe some rare shellfish along the coast for purple and indigo. You also scatter around some rare animals that will stay in their regions - currently they are wandering all over the place. For example, hawks in the Akypor region could become "northern hawks", and so forth. Then you introduce a project to emblazon a shield with menu options to select foreground color, background color, and animal. Note that the animals which come up in the menu will be only those actually present when the shield is emblazoned. The result would be a string something like "an iron shield emblazoned with red highland lion on green". In time, you could introduce a few more terms from heraldry such as animal positions - eg "rampant" - or quartering the shield.

Why do I emphasize this? Symbolism was fundamental to the development of all human cultures. Indeed, many paleoanthropologists regard the presence of symbolism as defining what is means to be human. It has to be reinforced in Cantr to overcome the overwhelming sense of sameness that currently predominates. We have to face the sad fact that roleplay alone seems unable to achieve this diversity.

Please wait for the next part to be posted

(E) Conflict & Warfare

We have now covered scarcity and privatization of land, dynasty and its opponents, regional variation, and the visible social symbols which express it all. Much scope for conflict, and finally for combat. But first we have to confront a sad fact.

(a) Combat is broken

Combat in the game is broken. It was broken deliberately by the introduction of certain reactionary programming changes, in particular tiredness and the skills system - the latter being if anything more significant. Consider the issues involved in overthrowing an established urban power whose combatants have access to locked buildings. You first have to find a sufficient number of awake characters whose players want them to fight and who on top of this are sufficiently skilled. The characters also have to be trusted enough to risk arming them with superior weapons and crowbars. Whereas all the defending town need do is drag people into locked buildings; once locked up, these prisoners might try breaking the locks, but they are "out of action" when it comes to the combat going on outside. So, locks and keys win out over weapons. And the burden of awake, willing, skilled and trusted is simply too much for any would-be army commander to meet. There are no effective armies in Cantr.

Let me be blunt. Cantr today has become rather boring. So the number of awake players is frankly not that great. And given these problems, the number of strategically-minded players staying with the game and who might create characters willing to fight is far below par. Finally, to get past an iron shield with other than a lucky shot, even wielding a very good weapon, you need to be highly skilled, at least "skillful" or "expert", which reduces even the above small subset to about a quarter of what it was. In a town of twenty awake people - and that's actually quite large - you would be lucky to raise an effective army of three or four. Combat is simply not doable.

(b) Examples that prove nothing

Of course, the forum apologists will quote the Barons at me. Well, it so happens one of my characters experienced an attack by the Barons. He was starving himself to death at the time. Why? Well, he was supposed to be a town deputy, but he could only do about 12 damage with a composite recurve bow since the recent introduction of skills, so I was in the process of terminating him. Anyhow, the Barons succeeded in their attack because they killed the town mayor who had gone wandering off with all the keys and gotten ambushed elsewhere. Therefore they had keys to buildings that even my deputy didn't have. They used them. It was all about dragging and locking up. Now I'm not really knocking the Barons, but I'm sure they'll be the first to admit that they've never really attacked a major large-population iron & steel town. That region is the ass-end of the continent, mostly minimal-population bone & stone cultures, mostly sleepers.

The apologists also mention piracy. Well, piracy is simply a way of bringing a moving "locked building" into a town. Hence piracy nowadays consists mostly of kidnapping, that is to say, dragging someone onto a locked boat and making off with them. So we're back to dragging again. Also, the life of a pirate these days is decidedly nasty, brutish and short. I have recently witnessed the end of one, though I think he was suicidal by that time. The odds are stacked against them. Consider this. Newspawns of late are almost entirely helpless. They don't know where they are or the names of nearby towns. Yet the moment a ship appears above the horizon they know its name. Without ever having seen it before. Such startling realism! So, enough of that. Let's now begin a serious discussion about how to fix the combat system.

(c) Some suggestions:

(i) All characters should be granted some or other combat skill of rough equivalence. Currently Cantr has a massively long list of weapons but they are all the same thing! In fact Cantr is, in this respect, the most primitive and backwards MUD-type game I've ever encounered. As a solution, I would recommend dividing characters into attribute classes and then assigning skills accordingly. Hefty characters would best use battle axes or the like, agile characters bows, dexterous and stealthy characters daggers or dirks. There is just so much that could be discussed here, and yet such discussions are far too rare. Overall, the point is that, given the shortage of really awake characters in the game, there simply must be a wider distribution of adequate combat skills. Give a roughly equivalent combat skill to everybody.

(ii) Locks should not be so absolute. Currently, locks defeat all except crowbars. That's even more boring than the stone-paper-scissors game. At least there are three elements in that one! So we downgrade current locks to "ordinary" and allow such a lock to be defeated by, say, one person wielding a crowbar or three wielding stone axes [EDIT: was sledgehammers] and so on. But that isn't the end of it. You then have the possibility of superior steel locks fixed to improved buildings with bronze doors (see above). Breaking one of those would require two people with "ordinary" crowbars or one person with a hardened-steel crowbar, this being some new process. And so on. You have introduced strategic variation. The key element is that ordinary locks should be breakable by non-steel technologies provided that sufficient people get busy with it. You thereby enhance the danger level.

(iii) Dragging living characters should be less effective relative to other forms of combat. In particular, dragging should always take at least one Cantr hour to complete and there should always be a message "You see X beginning to drag Y" appearing the very instant the project is begun. Finally, if the tiredness system is retained, then dragging should generate more tiredness, roughly equivalent to combat. Stealthy dragging is currently the modus operandi of both pirates and police tyrannies. Either way, it is an evil because it reduces almost all combat to dragging. If the tyrants want to complain, then the answer is simple: employ more guards! And if they fail to do so, then they might have to accept the risk of being overwhelmed. As I said, you thereby enhance the danger level.

(iv) It should generally be easier to kill in that shield defensive values should be reduced, but it should also be possible to guard or defend. Character A should simply launch a project of "guarding" character B, whereupon any attempts to hit character B should hit A first. Likewise, character A would have to be gotten out of the way before B can be dragged anywhere. Furthermore, it should also be possible for a character to launch a "defensive" project for themselves. During this time they can't work as normal, but it is rather harder to hurt them or drag them aywhere. A defensive project might be what any character reverts to once their normal project is completed. (Yes or no? Not sure about that one). So you can see how that would work. A town under immediate threat would no longer enjoy quite the same protection from locked buildings and dragging, but it could still live on with a routine of workers under guard. This would require considerable organization, but requiring organization is a good thing!

(v) Semi-enclosed "rooms" should enjoy some protection in combat, but this should not be total. These rooms are vehicles, boats and enclosures (see above). A while back we went from being able to hit people on vehicles to not being able to hit at all and back again. Generally, the truth should be somewhere inbetween. Partially improved defense. In other words, there should be some encouragement for launching an attack on a town using vehicles or boats. At the same time, the town's answer is the enclosure - rather than trying to wall off the entire town. So, therefore, citizens would be safer working in the private enclosures, but attackers would also be relatively safer mounted on vehicles. The two should more or less balance. With this in place, you might implement the possibility of dragging people off vehicles or out of enclosures without having the key, but it would then be a major issue requiring at minimum four to six people and always taking one full Cantrian hour. (Yes or no? Not sure about that one either).

(vi) Should the outer rooms of improved buildings have windows? With the window open, you could then have access to the same outside information you get from a vehicle. With the window closed, it would be as currently. An improved building with an open window would then function as an enclosure for the above example in (e) above. Once again, just a thought. Not sure about it.

These are all just suggestions, of course. They are open to debate. But the bottom line is that combat in Cantr should be more likely, more feasible and more varied. Above all, it should not have been undermined by the skills system to the extent that it has been. Things must be woken up.

Please wait for the next part to be posted

(F) Conclusion

Simple stategy games have victory conditions to meet, while most online roleplay games have character titles awarded by the server or else scheduled quests. We all seem agreed that none of this should apply in Cantr. However, this does place upon the designers the onus of providing a motivational framework within which the characters exist. The unifying argument of the whole post above has been that, if Cantr is meant to be a sort of parallel human life, then the game should correctly reproduce the context of that life, namely entropy, mortality, scarcity, dynasty, hierarchy and the potential for conflict.

The underlying threads here have therefore been: (a) Civilizations arise in a battle against entropy and mortality; (b) Evolution has provided us with enormously powerful drives; it is armed with these that we venture forth to do battle; (c) Any success against entropy and mortality is met in turn by scarcity; (d) Scarcity is the source both of markets and trade, but also of competition and ultimately conflict; (d) Arising most often from competition is the awesome power of dynasty, a result of (b) above since it is rooted in our evolutionary drives; (e) Against this is posed the final questions: Can democracy arise in the face of the power of dynastic elites? Can it survive them? A fun game would be one which allows this to play out.

If you read this far, many thanks!

Read it all and there is some very good ideas in there. I say implement all of it . It would take a long time to implement but it would make cantr much more realistic, and with the dynistys and such, and the increased conflict that scarcity would add, it would make it more fun as well

I read that fare, and I must say thank you!
Your ideas seem sound, though the implimentation of a few strikes a slightly offtune chord. however, that is not to in any way downplay a Very well written and thought out dissertation on the core nature and philosophy behind the game/society. Kudos to you on that at least.
Should spark some wonderful debates!

The Sociologist wrote:You can have a character who makes weapons expertly but repairs them poorly.

This is not true. The manufacture weapons skill governs both the creation and repair of weapons. You can however have a character that is an expert at making weapons, but can only poorly make tools. I am still reading through the rest of your posts, so if there is anything else, I will ammend this post as needed.

The Sociologist wrote:...players should be able to play the children of their own characters.

I can see no way of instilling filial piety into any babies. This is probably the closest to that ideal.

The Sociologist wrote:There are no effective armies in Cantr.

I would disagree on this. There are very few effective armies in Cantr, but that number is not zero. I have a character that as of 4 days ago was in a highly effective army (and not the Barons).

The Sociologist wrote:...to get past an iron shield with other than a lucky shot, even wielding a very good weapon, you need to be highly skilled, at least "skillful" or "expert", which reduces even the above small subset to about a quarter of what it was.

Not quiet true. An novice fighter with a crossbow will be able to deal reasonable damage to a novice fighter with an iron shield on a normal shot. If the defender is an expert fighter though, the attacker would have to be more highly skilled.

The Sociologist wrote:I'm sure they'll be the first to admit that they've never really attacked a major large-population iron & steel town.

They did attack Sjoftich Hills (east), although it was their downfall.

The Sociologist wrote:...three wielding sledgehammers... ordinary locks should be breakable by non-steel technologies provided that sufficient people get busy with it.

Sledgehammers have for some time now required steel to construct. If you wished to use them as an example of non-steel tools, you will have to choose another tool.

The Sociologist wrote:...there should be some encouragement for launching an attack on a town using vehicles or boats.

There currently is at least some encouragement. When you are in a vehicle, you cannot be dragged into a building (the most popular way to fight, as you have noted), thus allowing you to wage war without having to deal with that aspect.

Overall, I think you have a very interesting analysis, and I am interested in hearing what other people have to say about it. I agree on many points, and yet there are plenty of others on which I am not willing to concede at this time.

I've read it but I say, some ideas must be looked upon carefully, with one thing in mind: the freedom of doing anything you want and being anything you want in Cantr present now.

Talapus wrote:

The Sociologist wrote:I'm sure they'll be the first to admit that they've never really attacked a major large-population iron & steel town.

They did attack Sjoftich Hills (east), although it was their downfall.

That pretty much supports his point

Talapus wrote:

The Sociologist wrote:...three wielding sledgehammers... ordinary locks should be breakable by non-steel technologies provided that sufficient people get busy with it.

Sledgehammers have for some time now required steel to construct. If you wished to use them as an example of non-steel tools, you will have to choose another tool.

That's absurd. I own a sledgehammer, and it's made from a wooden handle and stone

I say everything is fine, and sledgehammers are wood and stone, they take no steel, and there are no effective armies in cantr. The supposedly all powerful Karnon army took three days to kill one of my characters who was a run away soldier. That is not effective, say it was an attack on the town I could have locked them all up in a few minutes, let alone three days

Solfius wrote:That pretty much supports his point

Agreed. I am not attempting to dispute The Sociologist on all points.

Solfius wrote:That's absurd. I own a sledgehammer, and it's made from a wooden handle and stone

*Waves his magic Resource wand and the stone of Solifius' sledgehammer turns into steel* Go check the construction in the game. I think you will find that I am right.

Solfius wrote:

Talapus wrote:

The Sociologist wrote:...three wielding sledgehammers... ordinary locks should be breakable by non-steel technologies provided that sufficient people get busy with it.

Sledgehammers have for some time now required steel to construct. If you wished to use them as an example of non-steel tools, you will have to choose another tool.

That's absurd. I own a sledgehammer, and it's made from a wooden handle and stone

I do too, but all the new ones aren't... lol

Very well written, and Tal caught the one or two discrepancies that I saw right off, like the weapon repair/manufacture thing.

I like some of the suggestions and some others I'm not so crazy about. I'll try to point out any specific things in a post later after I have time to go through it all again and make more notes. Right now, just mostly absorbing.

the_antisocial_hermit wrote:

Solfius wrote:
That's absurd. I own a sledgehammer, and it's made from a wooden handle and stone

I do too, but all the new ones aren't... lol

I meant *I* personally own a stone sledgehammer, in my shed outside.