Skill system rewrite - Seko/Doug ideas

[SekoETC]

Training should be necessary in order to become skilled. But I switched increasing the speed of combat skill development to be number 1 for the very reason that learning it would not take obsessive sparring, only something within reason. And those practice dummies would be nice but I don't see it happening. While increasing the development speed is just a matter of adding a multiplier into the source code. Well, naturally some testing would be needed, and instead of throwing in a huge multiplier we could start with 1.1 * and increase it gradually, while lowering the skill cap one can be spawned with.

How long do you think it should take to develop from an awkward fighter to an expert if you hit say, 1 person a day which already demands dedication, or 2 people a day, which requires cooperation, up to 4 people a day which means you would be so totally exhausted that you would be making yourself vulnerable. Or maybe not an expert, let's say efficient. 20 years? Which would mean 400 hits. Be that if a person was in a town of 20 people and hit each of them once a day for a year, they would gain the same experience, but they would be totally tired and if someone didn't like them whacking everyone with a waster, they could easily take them down. And most towns don't have 20 people anymore. So even in the situation of having 3 training partners + hitting yourself each day, it would take 5 years. It may sound like a lot but I think that currently, it takes longer than that.

[Rossato]

I think the learning curve shouldn't be linear. So, evolve from awkward to novicely would be very quick, since any little lesson would make you work very better. From novicely to efficient, a bit slower, but not so slow. With some practice, almost anyone can be efficient in almost any work. To be skillfully it must be harder, so will be hard to find someone skillful in something that he doesn't do for some years. And to master something, I think someone has to work at least 10 or 15 years doing somthing.

With that, the skill influence in time needed to make something can be increased.

I think that a inverse exponetial curve for the skill improvement is great. Maybe you can go from awkward to novice in a few days, then to efficient in one year, skillfully in 4 years, and expert in 10 years. Of course, you cannot work 10 years in only one type of project, so masters will be rare, just like in real life.

[Doug R.]

Jos has repeatedly said that many implementations in Cantr were meant to foster cooperation. However, as we all have observed, and psymann has summarized so well below (emphasis mine), this game-scale cooperation hasn't yet materialized.

4. People/businesses who do everything themselves

I can understand some characters having a sort of DIY personality. They want to do everything themselves. But this seems to cover most people. It's remarkably hard to run any business of any sort in Cantr because there's almost always someone else who will do the same thing.

Take manufaturing tools as an example. Most popular tools can be manufactured by anyone (stone hammer, bone knife, bone needle, stone axe) and in the case of all but the stone axe, provide every benefit of their iron counterparts other than a bit more inventory space taken up. Many more popularish tools (axe, pickaxe, shovel) can be made by pretty much anyone with only a few tools/machines. There are very few tools which require specialist machining/tooling, and none which require specialist skills.

My characters have come across so many businesses that will make anything from bed linen to ships, from steel battleaxes to dirt bikes, from diamond rings to apple pies. So instead of having a diversity of trades operating in the town, you get one rich company that makes everything and employs everyone. And that rich company then never needs to trade with others, they just make everything in-house.

My tailor could, with relative ease, build a smelting furnace, an anvil and start manufacturing weapons. Which is silly, because she's a tailor, so she doesn't. But elsewhere in the same town, other people are members of large companies that can do all their own tailoring. And my character who wants to make a sail for his ship can make his own far more quickly and easily than by using the town's ship supplies shop, because he can make it almost as quickly, and cuts out all the discussion over payment and requirements and so on that can take days.

I'd love to see it that you could gain mastery in a skill in some way, that would allow you to make items that you couldn't otherwise make. So only an expert/master tailor can make diamond jewelry. Only an expert toolsmith can make a steel flatter. Only an master shipbuilder can make a galleon. Then you can choose - make all your own average stuff, or trade with/employ people who have specialist skills that they can actually charge for and be needed for, and get good stuff.

I think you hit the nail on the head. The skills system doesn't go far enough to promote diversity.

The ideal system, I believe, would look something like this:

1) Take the existing skill system, fix the logical inconsistencies, and reclassify it as "aptitudes." Aptitudes are your character's genetic potentials. For example, some people are born athletic, and some are born clumsy. Aptitudes are fixed values.

2) Create a new skill system, where everyone starts out at awkward for every skill. Aptitude would influence how quickly skills can increase.

3) Make gaining skill much faster for high aptitude characters. For example, a character with high aptitude in mining should be able to go from awkward to expert in 5 game years (of constant mining). Characters with poor aptitude should acquire skill at perhaps 1/10th the high aptitude rate.

4) Make gaining all skills equal. Right now, strength, hunting and fighting don't seem to increase the same as project-based skills. It should be changed so that everything is on a level playing field.

5) Add another dimension to the tech tree by requiring a certain level of proficiency in a skill to do complex projects. Right now, proficiency only affects time (mostly inconsequently). Ideally, proficiency would affect time, quality, and ability. A character with average skill could produce an average item in X time. They could produce a poor quality item in 1/2X time, or a higher quality item in 2X time (an example scale only). Items of a quality higher than 1 over their current proficiency wouldn't be able to be created at all, and some items would require a minimum skill to make at any quality.

6) Have quality affect items. Quality would be visible, and low quality would increase decay.

7) Allow participation in projects that normally wouldn't be able to be performed due to low skill. This would be called apprenticing. It would slow a project down considerably (based on difference in present skill vs. needed skill), but the apprentice would gain skill much more quickly.

8) Skills should decay without use (although slowly). A skill would never decrease to more than 1/2 its highest level, however.

9) Clothing would have visible quality, and it would have to mean something (i.e. wear would have to be applied to clothes and could be travel/work based), meaning that wearing that silk gown while refining iron ore would suddenly be a bad idea, while wearing sturdy (and cheap) hemp clothes with an apron would be a much better idea).

So, to sum up, each character would have:

-Aptitude, either poor, moderate, or high (with possible sub divisions). They're born with this, and the values are fixed.

-Skill/Proficiency - same as now, but advancement rate is based on aptitude. If unused, decays over time.

Items would have quality - affects rot rate, possibly could affect project speed also.


How this would fundamentally change the game and push the cooperation that Jos envisioned:

While it wouldn't necessarily erase the mega-corporations or the multiple people specializing in one thing, it would mean that characters would have to identify their aptitudes (same as they identify skills now), then pick a profession and hone it in order to do anything of value. If a tailor wanted to suddenly make iron, they'd have to quit their tailoring job, resulting in some loss of proficiency in it, and then devote time to developing the proficiencies necessary to make iron. This would take time. It would be much, much easier then to seek out the iron and purchase it. This would finally promote real trade in the game.

Players wanting to advance more quickly would have to seek out an apprenticeships. This promotes cooperation.

Bakers and tailors would suddenly be very important.

Unfortunately, the fickle and unpredictable nature of Cantr character's lives means that for this system to work, skills would have to advance quickly for characters of high aptitude, since, if the master blacksmith has a heart-attack, the game should be able to produce a new one within a reasonable amount of time.

I would think, though, that having an added layer of skills-oriented goals would serve to enrich the game and hence keep players interested for longer periods.

Very controversial stuff:

It might do well to allow players to choose their character's aptitudes and allow basic economics to keep things balanced. A RPG type system of point allotment, where points are distributed amongst aptitudes, would be reasonable. This would create character balance, while allowing for a large degree of diversity. Sure, everyone will make strong characters that are good fighters, but that would only be at the beginning, and only for a few of their characters.

Why?

Using a points system, having a super-strong hunter/fighter would leave a character low on aptitude in the other categories, meaning they'd have to work harder for everything. Since they wouldn't be experts at anything else, they'd have to earn income through guarding, etc. When the game becomes saturated with these characters, it will become harder and harder to earn a successful living with them, and players will then diversify.

Also, playing all toughs would get boring.

It might also be beneficial to tweak the spawning system so that characters with high aptitudes are spawned into places that could use them. For example, each location would have an aptitude score, based on the characters already there (and is surrounding locations). Newspawns high in aptitude would preferentially be spawned into locations with low aptitude averages for that skill. Granted, this would backfire in the case of shipbuilding, but would work for almost anything else. (High-aptitude shipbuilding spawns could be restricted to coastal locations.)

[Vazalco]

Doesn't this belong in Suggestions?

[frenchfisher]

I really like most of this, though for your "radical suggestion" I'm slightly less enthused... as a firm believer in cognitive science I think a lot of "aptitude" is innate

Perhaps have "genetic" amounts of points for "meta-categories" of aptitude (for instance: manufacturing under one meta-category, hunting and fighting under another, and so on) and then allow the player to assign points to each individual aptitude. So they might get 7 attacking points, 10 manufacturing points, and 9 cooking points assigned to them, but have the ability to put those points in any distribution they'd like within the meta-categories?

What I'm proposing is much less convoluted than my explanation, I promise

[sanchez]

Moved to Suggestions.

I have to say at first reading, I'd worry about very small and developing regions. A system like you propose really only is useful or interesting in large cities and places with adequate available resources and trade. People who live in small zones with limited access to iron resources still need blacksmiths when they finally manage to get them. There are enough hardships as it is trying to build up infrastructure without compounding that with lack of skills.

I like randomness in skill assignments. I would like to see skills train faster though, and I think that might get enough of what you propose here as far as incentives for specialisation.

[Rossato]

I proposed something that can fit very well in this too.

I think that a inverse exponential curve for the skill improvement is great. Maybe you can go from awkward to novice in a few days, then to efficient in one year, skillfully in 4 years, and expert in 10 years. Of course, you cannot work 10 years in only one type of project, so masters will be rare, just like in real life.

Aptitude could be a constant that multiplies the skill improvement normal curve. So, if I have mining genes, I would learn mining faster, but still taking lots of time to get from good to excellent, and a short time from awkward to novice.

[Gran]

Aptitude could be a constant that multiplies the skill improvement normal curve. So, if I have mining genes, I would learn mining faster, but still taking lots of time to get from good to excellent, and a short time from awkward to novice.

The only thing is that there is no such "mining genes". Genes does not completely define the individual traits, but they define the chemical reactions in your body.

By this, we can have another idea: The idea of genetic potential, the way how the individual "works" and the real skills.

A skill can be easily improved by some of those reactions or even not changed at all. If someone can absorb more nutrients and make them into muscles so this person could have the strengh related habilities enhanced like mining, fighting, shooting or woodcutting, so skills would have actually more connection, like a skill potencial espectrum.

[trexdino]

This to me seems like ti would fit well if the game was larger, but with the current amount of people, it might not work as well. Also, what about the people that have already put time into advancing their own skills? WOuld we just all go back to awkward, or just newspawns now? Either way, it wouldn't quiet work.

[SekoETC]

I think this has been suggested before, just with different terminology. It would make sense that everyone started out as awkward and also that different people had their own talents that made them learn certain skills faster. I assume these strengths would be hidden and could only be figured out through observing the speed of skill development? That would be realistic. I'm not going to comment on every point (at least now) because it's such a big suggestion.

[DylPickle]

I think it's a great compilation of little ideas put into an overall suggestion that would be incredible for the game. (The radical stuff at the end would be worrying, though)

Unfortunately, there's just no way of implementing it fairly into the game right now. That's one hell of an idea for Cantr 3 though!!


There has been some mention about the small towns and lack of players. I think an implementation like this would be the first thing to actually force small towns to be more like rural communities. I see nothing wrong in encouraging people to immigrate to larger population groups: Urban cities.

[Rossato]

Yes, only a few cities could have enough masters to run alone. Cities will die and some will grow. Others will become agro villages.

[sanchez]

There has been some mention about the small towns and lack of players. I think an implementation like this would be the first thing to actually force small towns to be more like rural communities. I see nothing wrong in encouraging people to immigrate to larger population groups: Urban cities.

The English and Polish Zones support large cities of 100 people or more, with mutli-town empires, established industries and the like, and there are many advantages already for chars who live in these places in terms of security, available infrastructure, and resources.

Finding towns of even just 20 people can be at best difficult in smaller zones. So, migration is not really possible nor even a good idea to encourage. Worse, people who choose to play in developing regions, or who happen to play in low population language groups are exactly those who should be given a skills advantage, if we were to institutionalise one. Urban populations don't need it.

Random spawning assignment of all skill levels does compensate for this disparity. If anything, we should make spawned skillsets more random, but increases from training more like Rossato proposed. Though I doubt skills diversity is really the problem. Other mechanical incentives to cooperation such as tool rot, eating rates, etc. that have been applied across the board to all chars have not turned into the solutions they were planned to, as they don't adequately address differences in populations.

[SekoETC]

The lack of a blacksmith doesn't necessarily kill a community. Remember people, all you really need is food and protection from the animals. On the Finnish region there is no iron or bronze (or real communities for that matter) but people survive just fine if they have half a brain and pick up or produce a shield as soon as they are able. As long as it wasn't suddenly changed so that you needed some special equipment to make shields, time is not really an issue. Is slow development really such a bad thing?

I have a couple of characters on Omeo, now one of them is from the old island so it's natural that he would know technology, but the other one is a savage. What bothers me is that people around the savage who were also spawned on the island and probably never had extensive contact with foreigners, yet they aren't satisfied with their savage status, they're thinking like people on the mainland and striving to turn the island into a copy of a world they have never seen. If it could be made so that people on that sort of undeveloped regions had less knowledge of modern technology then maybe we might even get some diversity on the English region. Unfortunately the skills don't separate the knowledge required to make say a stone hammer from the knowledge of how to make a soldering iron. If different levels of technology required different skills, it would make more sense than grouping everything under artificial categories such as "manufacturing tools" and "manufacturing machinery". Also, if skills/knowledge could deteriorate, on developed regions people might eventually discover that it's easier to make hammers out of steel than stone. (Metals can be cast into a mold while stone needs to be drilled, which one sounds more time consuming?)

Sorry I couldn't say this shorter.

[Doug R.]

Doesn't this belong in Suggestions?

Not really. The description of the suggestions forum is as follows:

Out-of-character discussion forum for players of Cantr II to discuss new ideas for the development of the Cantr II game.

The thread was put forward as a philosophical/economic discussion (hence, the title). As a suggestion, this idea doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being approved for the development of Cantr II for the following reason:

A system like you propose really only is useful or interesting in large cities and places with adequate available resources and trade.

This to me seems like ti would fit well if the game was larger, but with the current amount of people, it might not work as well.

Populations are far too dispersed to make this system effective. Granted, being a scientist, I would find it fun to implement it to see the actual effects it has on the game society, but that probably wouldn't be very fun or fair to the players.

I admit that there was nothing self-evident about the non-suggestion nature of the topic, and I suppose the "if it looks like shit, and smells like shit, it's shit" principle applies. In hindsight, I should have reworded the introduction to make it evident of my intent.

Perhaps have "genetic" amounts of points for "meta-categories" of aptitude (for instance: manufacturing under one meta-category, hunting and fighting under another, and so on) and then allow the player to assign points to each individual aptitude.

So the amount of points per skill category would be dictated by genetics? Interesting. This would be obviously incompatible with skill-weighted spawning, however. The problem with this is that points based on genetics would tend to perpetuate the same skills in the same areas, which would have the effect of forcing people apart (as they leave to find areas where there skills are in demand), and that's the last thing we want.

There are enough hardships as it is trying to build up infrastructure without compounding that with lack of skills.

You are correct that this would stunt primitive areas. If you live in podunk and making iron is a chore, it'll become even more of a chore with this system. Quality blacksmiths would be in short supply due to the lack of available resources for training, so when hematite was obtained, items made would generally be of poor or average quality, yet be valued highly. But why is this bad? It could be arguably bad if Cantr limited you to one character, but since you can have up to 15, every player has an opportunity to play characters across the whole spectrum of economic prosperity. Those few characters in the boondocks would present extra technological challenges, or, if the challenges were indeed too high to overcome, at least provide a unique playing experience for that character.

But what's so interesting about playing a character in hides with bone weapons and wooden shields with no prospects of technological advancement? To each their own. I'm sure there would be plenty of people that would enjoy the challenge.

I proposed something that can fit very well in this too.

Now that you mention it, I remember your post. It seeped into my brain, bounced around in my subconscious, and manifested in this suggestion - er, discussion.

The only thing is that there is no such "mining genes".

But in Cantr, there is.

I assume these strengths would be hidden and could only be figured out through observing the speed of skill development? That would be realistic.

But not practical. Players can't be assumed to be observant enough to watch their skills that closely. The current system of instant discovery, while unexciting, is the most practical method.

I think an implementation like this would be the first thing to actually force small towns to be more like rural communities. I see nothing wrong in encouraging people to immigrate to larger population groups: Urban cities.

I agree 100%

Finding towns of even just 20 people can be at best difficult in smaller zones. So, migration is not really possible nor even a good idea to encourage.

I don't buy that keeping the player population diluted is a good thing. If you have 10 locations with an average of 4 characters per location, in my opinion having 30 characters in one location and the rest dispersed doing "whatever" is much better for the game than having 10 "micro locations" where nothing gets accomplished anyway due to lack of characters.