I think this sounds like a good idea. I think you should see what would happen if your Civilizations waged a Civil war or there was prehaps a revolution. And when you speak of warfare. Would you take prisoners of war. And I would like to see your ideas for espionage. Since that is vital. I think that there should be tangible currency. Since in most Minecraft Iconomies the money isn't physically in your charracter. I think that Civilizations should begin with the union of several factions, much like how tribes of old formed nations under one or a council of leaders.-Those are just some ideas from a 7th grader so I might no be of much help.
These ideas appear from the organic and flexible structure of the server, the people and the ideas in the tribes, nations, whatever are what drive these. A currency I don't think would form until much later because trade would be rather limited. I don't want to force the countries and tribes(maybe a gentle push), I want them to evolve to their environment in the contexts of military, politics and the economy.
Ocean settlements would be cool. One thing we should try to enforce is either two types of ocean settlements (take your pick)
1. Houses on stilts in the middle of the ocean, clearly marked and have all resources (wheat, trees, reeds) with them and have access to deep sea mineshafts...
2. Ocean floor villages, however marked by obvious lighting and marks in the terrain the residents have made to make the area liveable.
It would be an interesting concept, especially to see how their technology would grow to meet the standards of the other tribes on land and underground.
mining, fishing, farming, cooking, swordsmanship, archery, alchemy, digging, crafting, (I could only think of these, but surely there is more possible)
With the 1.3 system of enchanting it is easy to do many enchantments in minutes, so that could be a skill worth discussing. Also-
trading, a split of mob swordsmanship and pvp, lumbering and breeding
Tentative Skill List, with descriptions of how they'd work.
In general, this whole system should be implemented by REDUCING the effectiveness of most "skills", so that as they advance they approach the default difficulty of vanilla Minecraft. This would be done in most cases by imposing a cooldown period for tasks, or increasing the delays that already exist for things like breaking blocks.
Agriculture: Reduces cooldown on planting/hoeing, and speeds up harvesting of pumpkins, melons, cocoa. Increases yield of wheat/seed, and raises likelihood of broken leaves dropping apples or saplings. Also raises likelihood of bonemeal causing a sapling or mushroom to grow.
Angler: The higher the skill, the more likely the fish are to bite.
Archer: Lower skill has a longer time to charge the bow, and less zoom effect when fully charged; higher skill gives faster charging and more detailed zoom.
Boatman: Boat speed is negatively impacted by inventory, slowing you down considerably if you have more cargo. Higher skills reduce the penalty.
Crafter: A cooldown for using a crafting table is lowered as this skill rises. There is also a maximum on the number of batches produced by shift-clicking, which is highest at high skill.
Jump: A cooldown period for jumping is introduced, which is increased by the number of inventory panes used (so you are slowed down more if you're carrying more). As jump experience rises, the cooldown period is reduced.
Engineer: Cooldown for placing and removing rails and redstone wire and devices is reduced by this skill.
Excavator: Includes both breaking and placing those blocks best harvested with a shovel. Lower cooldown for placing blocks, faster digging.
Mason/Miner: Includes both breaking and placing those blocks harvested with a pick. Reduces cooldown for placing blocks, speeds up breaking them.
Melee: Each strike upon a mob to do damage counts towards this skill. Higher skill increases damage, and increases effectiveness of parrying with a sword.
Rancher: Kind of a catch-all for taking care of livestock, apart from slaughtering them (which is basically melee). This covers using bones to tame wolves, fish to tame ocelots, buckets to collect milk from cows, shears to collect wool, the likelihood that a thrown egg will produce a chicken, etc.
Smelter: Affects cooldown for placing and removing things in furnaces, plus number of items that can be moved with a single shift-click.
Sprint: Every double tap of the space bar is a sprint action. Higher skill can run longer before becoming tired.
Swimming: Spacebar automatically "releases" after a few seconds, faster if you're carrying a lot; higher swimming skill means you can hold it down longer before you have to release and press it again. Low skill also reduces lung capacity.
Timberwright: Includes both breaking and placing blocks that are best harvested with axes. Faster chopping, shorter cooldown on placing.
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This is a pretty interesting idea. Ultimately, I think that the structure of the game limits what will be gained by this experiment. I think that if your goal is to explore how humans develop order from chaos in a flexible artificial environment, EVE Online will suit your needs more than Minecraft ever will.
Jump: A cooldown period for jumping is introduced, which is increased by the number of inventory panes used (so you are slowed down more if you're carrying more). As jump experience rises, the cooldown period is reduced.
Swimming: Spacebar automatically "releases" after a few seconds, faster if you're carrying a lot; higher swimming skill means you can hold it down longer before you have to release and press it again. Low skill also reduces lung capacity.
First off, I don't really like the idea of a jumping cooldown because jumping is such a big part of movement in Minecraft, I could understand a movement speed thing or taking rests while walking, but the incapability of jumping I don't like because you need it to move up anything that is 1 block. In the end I feel like people would just make staircases EVERYWHERE and flatten everything ultimately making things less aesthetically pleasing and just power-gaming it to remove the need for jumping.
Secondly, the swimming makes me think that we really shouldn't allow water cities, they truly would be too easy to defend and advantageous over other civilization locations. I definitely don't think underwater construction should really be allowed.
OP, you said stone tools should be removed, but bear in mind that American Indians used stone tools...perhaps stone tools/wood should be incredibly easy to break in such a system (One or two uses) to force the user to have to bring MANY tools with them. Also, even if cobble tools would get picked you would immediately run into the issue that cobble tools are req'd to make iron, to make gold/dia.
First off, I don't really like the idea of a jumping cooldown because jumping is such a big part of movement in Minecraft, I could understand a movement speed thing or taking rests while walking, but the incapability of jumping I don't like because you need it to move up anything that is 1 block. In the end I feel like people would just make staircases EVERYWHERE and flatten everything ultimately making things less aesthetically pleasing and just power-gaming it to remove the need for jumping.
Secondly, the swimming makes me think that we really shouldn't allow water cities, they truly would be too easy to defend and advantageous over other civilization locations. I definitely don't think underwater construction should really be allowed.
Yes, jumping is a huge part of movement. Crafting and mining are huge parts of Minecraft. But the point of these modifications is to introduce tactical-level limitations to a game that has thus far been primarily strategic in scope. Things that take virtually no time and are terribly convenient in vanilla Minecraft take quite a lot of time and are often very inconvenient in real life.
Transportation and maneuver are critically important aspects to both military maneuver and to logistics and trade. Please note that the cooldown for jumping is a cooldown, not an absolute bar, AND it's heavily influenced by inventory. If you are carrying next to nothing, you can jump as much as you want. If you are laden with 20 stacks of iron ingots, it may take a while to reach the top of that hill.
People won't make staircases everywhere, but they sure will want to put them on frequently used travel routes. And that's precisely the point. We WANT to reward people for making these investments in infrastructure. We want players to have reasons to build roads, tunnels, rail lines, stairs and other such things.
We don't need to worry about them totally flattening the landscape for ease of travel for two reasons. First, making it TOO easy also makes it too easy for your enemies. You'll want to have roads with choke points that you can control, perhaps with gatehouses in strategic positions where you can charge tolls. Second, remember the other skills: It will take a lot of labour to collect and place the resources to build this infrastructure. Simply levelling everything for laziness isn't going to be an cheap option.
As for water/swimming, I don't think we need to worry about it. Building on or under water has its own costs and risks; if someone's going to spend the effort, let them reap the rewards.
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Yes, jumping is a huge part of movement. Crafting and mining are huge parts of Minecraft. But the point of these modifications is to introduce tactical-level limitations to a game that has thus far been primarily strategic in scope. Things that take virtually no time and are terribly convenient in vanilla Minecraft take quite a lot of time and are often very inconvenient in real life.
Transportation and maneuver are critically important aspects to both military maneuver and to logistics and trade. Please note that the cooldown for jumping is a cooldown, not an absolute bar, AND it's heavily influenced by inventory. If you are carrying next to nothing, you can jump as much as you want. If you are laden with 20 stacks of iron ingots, it may take a while to reach the top of that hill.
People won't make staircases everywhere, but they sure will want to put them on frequently used travel routes. And that's precisely the point. We WANT to reward people for making these investments in infrastructure. We want players to have reasons to build roads, tunnels, rail lines, stairs and other such things.
We don't need to worry about them totally flattening the landscape for ease of travel for two reasons. First, making it TOO easy also makes it too easy for your enemies. You'll want to have roads with choke points that you can control, perhaps with gatehouses in strategic positions where you can charge tolls. Second, remember the other skills: It will take a lot of labour to collect and place the resources to build this infrastructure. Simply levelling everything for laziness isn't going to be an cheap option.
As for water/swimming, I don't think we need to worry about it. Building on or under water has its own costs and risks; if someone's going to spend the effort, let them reap the rewards.
You make some good points, I suppose I agree with them.
Anyways, onto the topic of military and invasions, what is the standpoint for TNT? It is unbelievably useful and destructive, it can blow up massive things quite quickly. So how do you prevent every single invasion from being a bunch of people making a big pile of TNT and setting it ablaze? Either there must be rules/limitations made or it must be made very difficult to set up and use, because a city can be truly devastated by just a few blocks of TNT, which isn't exactly the hardest thing to mass produce...
Edit : Also, Ratmancer, I would love to see a nice neat list of the things we have discussed if possible because it would make it much easier to look for problems or further flesh out these ideas if they are all easy to look at and talk about. I would try to do this myself, but since it is your topic and idea, I figured you might want to set it up so everything can be clear.
TNT is easily bested with a bucket of water. Not to mention the fact that TNT is expensive. I think TNT is fine the way it is.
TNT is not easily bested when a stack of it is quickly popped up next to your town and lit up. And also, expensive? Gunpowder is not exactly hard to acquire, and neither is sand, TNT is very devastating.
Interesting question about TNT. I should think it would be much more useful, both for combat and for building. At present it takes relatively little time to excavate an area by pick or shovel, so TNT doesn't really save you much time. But with the delays for mining I'm suggesting, blasting becomes a much more viable option.
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That would raise concerns for the players - if we upped the amount TNT destroyed, then players would be worried about being killed by their experiments in explosions. If we kept it the same, it would be less useful. If we added the not-destroying-resource function, then TNT would be a very viable thing to use on the large scale.
Ah. I'm not suggesting we increase the explosive power of TNT. I'm simply remarking that if we made tasks like mining your way through rock more labour-intensive and inconvenient, it would become more cost-effective to use TNT instead, because it would save you a lot of time. I almost never use TNT in my games, except for amusement, because mining is so fast anyway and I don't like wasting the resource blocks that would be destroyed.
However, if labour becomes more expensive (that is, it costs you more time to use labour), then TNT becomes a fabulous labour-saving device, and it's worth expending the sand, gunpowder, and lost minerals to get the job done faster.
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But my question has yet to be answered, TNT could be considered a superpower when it comes to combat, especially when it would be so hard to repair the damage caused by it due to the difficulties of gaining resources and the extra time it takes to construct things, so should something be done to limit it's use in combat? Because it seems like a weapon too powerful and too cheap.
That is a question of balance, and I just don't know the answer. I don't use TNT very much, and I've virtual no experience in its use in combat. It may be too powerful, or not.
I suspect that it won't be too powerful. You still need to place it, and that will likely mean tunnelling, which will take more time than it does in vanilla. But fortifications can be built with traps underground that make the life of a sapper dangerous. Artillery to launch TNT could be another approach, but artillery has its own vulnerabilities, including other artillery.
I think it's just premature to make assumptions about which strategies will prove overpowered. I'd rather leave that question to be decided in actual play.
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TNT is rather difficult to use in combat. It takes at least a few creeper kills to get a single block of it. You could place down TNT and try to obliterate your enemies with its relatively weak damage, not to mention aforementioned limitations on placing of blocks and waiting for the ignition to work, and even finding a way to iginite it. TNT can be used for cannons, but don't forget that TNT cannons require more than one TNT, and are fairly inaccurate and not very practical unless trying to break through a wall. Within a sociological experiment such as this, it's natural for one method of combat, trade, government, etc. to be better than another.
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<Insert Einstein quote here> <Insert mod/texturepack/skinshop/server/clan banner here> <Insert favorite posts here>.....As you can see, I procrastinate a little too much
We talk of tunneling; will players lose the ability to see names through blocks? It would be pointless tunneling if you have to sneak the whole way. You will be noticed when you change elevation. That's why we need to lose that ability, otherwise secret plans would be ruined. The point of a tunnel is to be unnoticed, not to be herd-de-dur killed by players seeing "ExampleName" through the floor.
Yeah something definitely needs to be done about this, I would say, you can't see it through any block period, so it's pretty much like you're always sneaking, but if you are in view you can see names.
The Map
It will be limited in dimensions proportionally to the number of players. It will have several land masses sitting on an ocean with varying geography and biomes. There will be an unequal distribution of resources and some resources may be found exclusively in some areas, to promote trade.
Lack of players
It will take many players to create a functioning server with economics and politics.
Death
Will it be a 1 hour ban or maybe an instant respawn?
Combat
Is the bow and arrow too weak? Minecraft combat is fairly awkward.
Unequal distribution of resources
Resources should vary from area to area, to create scarcity and promote trade or war.
The lone wolf
The player is too powerful, he does not need the protection or help of others so tribes or countries cannot form.
Communication
Global chat simplifies diplomacy and trade and could be clogged with large numbers of players. Maybe a forced local chat with a built in whisper. This would promote espionage, diplomats and runners. However could be very inconvenient.
Specialization
The player in minecraft can do anything. Specialization should occur, where a some players are better at some things than others.
Tom Tzu's skill system
Skill levels are determined by your last 1000* actions in proportion to each other.
Skills impose placing and breaking time with their respective skill and reduce efficiency at their lowest levels. Higher levels exceed these delays and improve efficiency. These skills should be considered when reviewing any aspect of this idea because it changes the fundamentals of the game.
Players customisation
Players names can prevent espionage as they are very visible. Players skins might break immersion. How would you tell what nation or tribe a person comes from? Would you need too?
TNT
Is it too impractical? Would it need to be nerfed or buffed?
Underwater settlements
May prove themselves to be superior to those of land settlements in their hidden nature and defensive qualities and are extremely artificial and may break immersion.
Removal of stone tools
Stone is an incredibly common resources and the fact that it has so many practical uses is dangerous to the simulation. The removal of stone tools would mean you could not mine iron, so wood tools would be more widely used and should receive a buff to mine iron.
Perhaps each tribe, nation, etc should be required to adopt some sort of general uniform, or at least a colour which can be worn by the players belonging to nation x or village y, especially for soldiers in combat, so you know who to kill. Apart from colours and uniforms, some basic, non-eccentric clothes for the general population (meaning espionage is possible) to wear should be made?
Just a thought. I personally think people runnning around in creeper skins or something would just ruin the mood of the simulation.
These ideas appear from the organic and flexible structure of the server, the people and the ideas in the tribes, nations, whatever are what drive these. A currency I don't think would form until much later because trade would be rather limited. I don't want to force the countries and tribes(maybe a gentle push), I want them to evolve to their environment in the contexts of military, politics and the economy.
1. Houses on stilts in the middle of the ocean, clearly marked and have all resources (wheat, trees, reeds) with them and have access to deep sea mineshafts...
2. Ocean floor villages, however marked by obvious lighting and marks in the terrain the residents have made to make the area liveable.
It would be an interesting concept, especially to see how their technology would grow to meet the standards of the other tribes on land and underground.
With the 1.3 system of enchanting it is easy to do many enchantments in minutes, so that could be a skill worth discussing. Also-
trading, a split of mob swordsmanship and pvp, lumbering and breeding
In general, this whole system should be implemented by REDUCING the effectiveness of most "skills", so that as they advance they approach the default difficulty of vanilla Minecraft. This would be done in most cases by imposing a cooldown period for tasks, or increasing the delays that already exist for things like breaking blocks.
Agriculture: Reduces cooldown on planting/hoeing, and speeds up harvesting of pumpkins, melons, cocoa. Increases yield of wheat/seed, and raises likelihood of broken leaves dropping apples or saplings. Also raises likelihood of bonemeal causing a sapling or mushroom to grow.
Angler: The higher the skill, the more likely the fish are to bite.
Archer: Lower skill has a longer time to charge the bow, and less zoom effect when fully charged; higher skill gives faster charging and more detailed zoom.
Boatman: Boat speed is negatively impacted by inventory, slowing you down considerably if you have more cargo. Higher skills reduce the penalty.
Crafter: A cooldown for using a crafting table is lowered as this skill rises. There is also a maximum on the number of batches produced by shift-clicking, which is highest at high skill.
Jump: A cooldown period for jumping is introduced, which is increased by the number of inventory panes used (so you are slowed down more if you're carrying more). As jump experience rises, the cooldown period is reduced.
Engineer: Cooldown for placing and removing rails and redstone wire and devices is reduced by this skill.
Excavator: Includes both breaking and placing those blocks best harvested with a shovel. Lower cooldown for placing blocks, faster digging.
Mason/Miner: Includes both breaking and placing those blocks harvested with a pick. Reduces cooldown for placing blocks, speeds up breaking them.
Melee: Each strike upon a mob to do damage counts towards this skill. Higher skill increases damage, and increases effectiveness of parrying with a sword.
Rancher: Kind of a catch-all for taking care of livestock, apart from slaughtering them (which is basically melee). This covers using bones to tame wolves, fish to tame ocelots, buckets to collect milk from cows, shears to collect wool, the likelihood that a thrown egg will produce a chicken, etc.
Smelter: Affects cooldown for placing and removing things in furnaces, plus number of items that can be moved with a single shift-click.
Sprint: Every double tap of the space bar is a sprint action. Higher skill can run longer before becoming tired.
Swimming: Spacebar automatically "releases" after a few seconds, faster if you're carrying a lot; higher swimming skill means you can hold it down longer before you have to release and press it again. Low skill also reduces lung capacity.
Timberwright: Includes both breaking and placing blocks that are best harvested with axes. Faster chopping, shorter cooldown on placing.
First off, I don't really like the idea of a jumping cooldown because jumping is such a big part of movement in Minecraft, I could understand a movement speed thing or taking rests while walking, but the incapability of jumping I don't like because you need it to move up anything that is 1 block. In the end I feel like people would just make staircases EVERYWHERE and flatten everything ultimately making things less aesthetically pleasing and just power-gaming it to remove the need for jumping.
Secondly, the swimming makes me think that we really shouldn't allow water cities, they truly would be too easy to defend and advantageous over other civilization locations. I definitely don't think underwater construction should really be allowed.
Yes, jumping is a huge part of movement. Crafting and mining are huge parts of Minecraft. But the point of these modifications is to introduce tactical-level limitations to a game that has thus far been primarily strategic in scope. Things that take virtually no time and are terribly convenient in vanilla Minecraft take quite a lot of time and are often very inconvenient in real life.
Transportation and maneuver are critically important aspects to both military maneuver and to logistics and trade. Please note that the cooldown for jumping is a cooldown, not an absolute bar, AND it's heavily influenced by inventory. If you are carrying next to nothing, you can jump as much as you want. If you are laden with 20 stacks of iron ingots, it may take a while to reach the top of that hill.
People won't make staircases everywhere, but they sure will want to put them on frequently used travel routes. And that's precisely the point. We WANT to reward people for making these investments in infrastructure. We want players to have reasons to build roads, tunnels, rail lines, stairs and other such things.
We don't need to worry about them totally flattening the landscape for ease of travel for two reasons. First, making it TOO easy also makes it too easy for your enemies. You'll want to have roads with choke points that you can control, perhaps with gatehouses in strategic positions where you can charge tolls. Second, remember the other skills: It will take a lot of labour to collect and place the resources to build this infrastructure. Simply levelling everything for laziness isn't going to be an cheap option.
As for water/swimming, I don't think we need to worry about it. Building on or under water has its own costs and risks; if someone's going to spend the effort, let them reap the rewards.
You make some good points, I suppose I agree with them.
Anyways, onto the topic of military and invasions, what is the standpoint for TNT? It is unbelievably useful and destructive, it can blow up massive things quite quickly. So how do you prevent every single invasion from being a bunch of people making a big pile of TNT and setting it ablaze? Either there must be rules/limitations made or it must be made very difficult to set up and use, because a city can be truly devastated by just a few blocks of TNT, which isn't exactly the hardest thing to mass produce...
Edit : Also, Ratmancer, I would love to see a nice neat list of the things we have discussed if possible because it would make it much easier to look for problems or further flesh out these ideas if they are all easy to look at and talk about. I would try to do this myself, but since it is your topic and idea, I figured you might want to set it up so everything can be clear.
TNT is not easily bested when a stack of it is quickly popped up next to your town and lit up. And also, expensive? Gunpowder is not exactly hard to acquire, and neither is sand, TNT is very devastating.
Ah. I'm not suggesting we increase the explosive power of TNT. I'm simply remarking that if we made tasks like mining your way through rock more labour-intensive and inconvenient, it would become more cost-effective to use TNT instead, because it would save you a lot of time. I almost never use TNT in my games, except for amusement, because mining is so fast anyway and I don't like wasting the resource blocks that would be destroyed.
However, if labour becomes more expensive (that is, it costs you more time to use labour), then TNT becomes a fabulous labour-saving device, and it's worth expending the sand, gunpowder, and lost minerals to get the job done faster.
I suspect that it won't be too powerful. You still need to place it, and that will likely mean tunnelling, which will take more time than it does in vanilla. But fortifications can be built with traps underground that make the life of a sapper dangerous. Artillery to launch TNT could be another approach, but artillery has its own vulnerabilities, including other artillery.
I think it's just premature to make assumptions about which strategies will prove overpowered. I'd rather leave that question to be decided in actual play.
Yeah something definitely needs to be done about this, I would say, you can't see it through any block period, so it's pretty much like you're always sneaking, but if you are in view you can see names.
The Map
It will be limited in dimensions proportionally to the number of players. It will have several land masses sitting on an ocean with varying geography and biomes. There will be an unequal distribution of resources and some resources may be found exclusively in some areas, to promote trade.
Lack of players
It will take many players to create a functioning server with economics and politics.
Death
Will it be a 1 hour ban or maybe an instant respawn?
Combat
Is the bow and arrow too weak? Minecraft combat is fairly awkward.
Unequal distribution of resources
Resources should vary from area to area, to create scarcity and promote trade or war.
The lone wolf
The player is too powerful, he does not need the protection or help of others so tribes or countries cannot form.
Communication
Global chat simplifies diplomacy and trade and could be clogged with large numbers of players. Maybe a forced local chat with a built in whisper. This would promote espionage, diplomats and runners. However could be very inconvenient.
Specialization
The player in minecraft can do anything. Specialization should occur, where a some players are better at some things than others.
Tom Tzu's skill system
Skill levels are determined by your last 1000* actions in proportion to each other.
Agriculture
Archer
Crafter
Boatman
Jump
Engineer
Excavator
Mason/Miner
Melee
Rancher (animals)
Smelter
Sprint
Swimming
Timberwright
Skills impose placing and breaking time with their respective skill and reduce efficiency at their lowest levels. Higher levels exceed these delays and improve efficiency. These skills should be considered when reviewing any aspect of this idea because it changes the fundamentals of the game.
Players customisation
Players names can prevent espionage as they are very visible. Players skins might break immersion. How would you tell what nation or tribe a person comes from? Would you need too?
TNT
Is it too impractical? Would it need to be nerfed or buffed?
Underwater settlements
May prove themselves to be superior to those of land settlements in their hidden nature and defensive qualities and are extremely artificial and may break immersion.
Removal of stone tools
Stone is an incredibly common resources and the fact that it has so many practical uses is dangerous to the simulation. The removal of stone tools would mean you could not mine iron, so wood tools would be more widely used and should receive a buff to mine iron.
Perhaps each tribe, nation, etc should be required to adopt some sort of general uniform, or at least a colour which can be worn by the players belonging to nation x or village y, especially for soldiers in combat, so you know who to kill. Apart from colours and uniforms, some basic, non-eccentric clothes for the general population (meaning espionage is possible) to wear should be made?
Just a thought. I personally think people runnning around in creeper skins or something would just ruin the mood of the simulation.