Today I want to share my thoughts on how we could change the birth and respawning mechanisms and add a measurement (a point system, if you will) of a player’s helpfulness towards others. The goals I have with this are:
- Remove the reason for people to do suicide marathons
- Reduce the power that griefers can have over you
- Reduce the risk to your town/family with keeping unknown babies (griefers again)
- Give you opportunity to come back to your favorite families/towns
- Make it possible to revive families/towns which have died out
- Give you a sense of accomplishment when you do things that benefit your descendants. More helpful players will achieve a higher score.
This design is a work in progress, and your feedback is welcome. Let’s begin…
Scoring
- For every child in your family that you help raise to adult age, you will be awarded points, lets call them FPs (Family Points) for now. You do not have to be a mother to get FPs.
- If you spawn as an Eve and create a new family, you will be awarded FPs for each new generation where a child is born and grows to be an adult, until the family dies out the first time.
- FPs are used when you choose Rebirth or Rekindle (see below), but we will also keep a permanent score which doesn’t get reduced when you use your FPs.
Rebirth
If you wish to be reborn in a family that you have previously lived in, you can do so by using your FPs, provided that:
- There is a fertile woman alive in the family.
- You have not been banished by the family members.
- The family has actively chosen that they would like you to come back to them. This is done by burying a dead family member in a proper grave. If someone is a griefer or unpleasant to play with, don’t bury that person and then they will not come back to the same family again.
Doing a suicide marathon will never get you reborn in the same family. Having descendants who wish you to come back to them is the new way.
UI-wise, you use a button in your family tree to get reborn.
Rekindling a Family (Respawning)
The old condition for Eve respawn (live to 60 as Eve and max 3 fertile women on server) is removed. Griefers can no longer destroy your ability to respawn by killing you. In fact we will not call this action Respawning, but “Rekindling”.
You will be able to Rekindle a family if:
- The family has died out or if it has no fertile women or girl children left.
- You have not been banished by the family members.
- You were buried by the family or you were one of the last family members to die (when there were no-one left to bury you).
Rekindling means that you appear as a young fertile woman in the family and your place in the family tree will be the next row after the last living generation before you.You are not seen as an Eve when you do this. You will get the same family name again, but get to pick your own given name.
UI-wise, you use a button in your family tree to Rekindle a family.
Rekindling will use up more FPs than rebirth, so it’s always better for a family to stay alive, than to die out and then get rekindled. On low population servers, Rekindling may be the only way to keep a family going for more than 24 hours. We will make the FP cost of Rekindling small families lower than for large ones, so small families also will have opportunity to reach high in the tech tree and build nice cities.
Starting a life in a new family
When you don’t wish to be reborn in or rekindle one of your previous families, you use the normal play button. This will put you in a family you have not been born in before.
One idea I have here, to avoid baby suicides, is to show you an observer mode of the proposed mother for 10 seconds and let you choose to get born or to skip to the next available mother. So as a mother, you know that your child wants to have you as mother. If you skip through all available mothers, you will become an Eve.
Alternatively, we could have a cool-down timer for getting born, so you can’t do it more than once per 90 seconds or so. This would also discourage suicide marathons I think.
Supporting Features
There would be some difficulties for players if we just implemented this design and left everything else the same. For example: since a player has to be buried to be eligible for rebirth, there would have to be a sure way for family members to find the remains of someone who died in the wilderness (for example a special compass that shows you the way). We would add such means too.
