Dark Subject - What happens to dead people?

I was thinking… you COULD add the ageing portion, as well as keep farming at a stable level…

If you mod this in of course. If the farm level tells the game how many families can be there, you add in that each family can ONLY have two babies. if that is the level, then the population will not sink or increase.

Thus, increasing population would be in two’s instead in order to make a new family.

The worst part of that would be coding the idea of incest and hereditary skills (profession to maybe/not)

This is the type of thing that makes aging appealing to me. You can twist around the lengths and attributes of the life stages to provide whatever level of challenge you want, even make the game easier if you feel like it; that part isn’t what I care about. It’s the possibilities for new behaviors and new interactions that makes aging interesting.

Social skills, accumulated scarring/injury, attitudes towards risk and work, craftsmanship, needs and wants, role in the community… so many things can change with age. I feel there’s a lot of potential in there.

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Making an awesome legacy for a warrior who had a son who became an even better warrior (:
inheriting traits and so forth would give this game great depth and instead of you going like “ok villager one, two and three are going to be farmers all the rest do whatever” you would pick a profession for each villager depending on his traits (you can choose not to also) thus making him good at the profession that fits him or average at another profession the might not suit him but he still does

It wouldn’t seem right seeing the Magma Smith die of old age. But I do love the ideas of this diversity. So the carpenter can train his son to be a carpenter and things like that. And we can have a legendary soldier training the young bloods at the barracks but he’s too old to go on raids and all.

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Completely new set of professions.
Stone carver makes headstones, Scavenger collects bodies, Embalmer preserves the corpses (and stuffs animals) grave digger digs the hole, Priest makes the funeral, Mourners, etc…
You can script it.

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note to self, be careful when downloading mods from @Ondaderthad:smiley:

but honestly, that does add an interesting, if twisted dimension to the game… but thats what’s great about the modding community!

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Look at games where it’s been pulled off then, as an example take the virtual villagers series. You manage a group of people that have to learn skills to survive, not the same as this but there is certainly some big similarities. Anyway though the ageing in that case helps add to the survival aspects and stops characters from eventually becoming ultimate masters at everything, it’s still possible to do it but it requires working at and it’s not too easy, combine that with the children getting a minor boost to skills the adults were good at and the system works.

I’d have no problems having something like that in stonehearth, just treat the dead bodies as resources to go to a graveyard site and that’s an easy fix. Of course there would need to be some bodies as things like dragons, cows, or sheep would presumably have be useful for harvesting for things like leather or meat at least and while doing the same thing to things like humans or orcs could be unsettling to some, someone might want their people to perform cannibalism and make clothes out of the skins of their enemies.

EDIT: From reddit
Q: What about the family model? Two people have a kid and that childs traits is based on the parents and the father passively trains him/her on his.trade at home etc… also I hope you mange to.answer one of my questions today

A: We want your settlers to have relationships: to fall in love, mourn each other when they die, etc. Kids are tough. We’re not sure how to model kids moving from infant through childhood to adulthood. Maybe we can do something simple like have an infant to pow instantly “levels up” to a little kid then bam later becomes a full grown adult. We’ll keep thinking about it.

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I’m not worried about what happens when my civs die. I just need a taxidermist profession so I can stuff Cthulhu’s head when I kill him and mount it in the local pub. It will hang next to every other titan who has the misfortune of spawning in my neck of the woods :stuck_out_tongue:

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If there are game mechanics for corpses (raising them as zombies etc) then they may need to linger for a bit.
Otherwise they can sink into the ground and be removed.

i would not like an aging process ala the Sims, i rather the the Twin Gods take a leaf from Evil Genius, Minions just drop dead & leave loot behind.

people get upgraded thru different training structure.

best if Monster can be farmed for different parts, ala Monster hunter, to create something.

I would like it really if they didn’t easily disappere and you maybe need to build cemetery where they can find there last bed.
And if they had a fakilie friends or something like tnat they could come sometimes to their grave and to grieve for the deads.
This would make the game much more interesting i think because you woldnt only say; hes dead, and now he disappere. You would say he is dead i have a relation to him. So if you had a solider who is injured you didn’t seend him into the battle again, because you think af him and his friends/familie.

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Definitely should have a military funeral for fallen soldiers!

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This was one of the main reason I asked about Core vs Mods
All the Game Mechanics are Mods either from the Devs themselves or later by other modders. So it will be easy to pick the existing scripts and modify or extend them with anything you want.
Even if the death script ends abruptly with a “corpse disappears” routine then you can replace it with your own simple or complex one.

I’m still in favour of the exploding corpses. You can have the blood, or go with something like grunt birthday party.

i am still in favor of some nice particle effect when a unit is slain… but the more i think about it, the more i like the potential to see enemies risen from the dead… this place is having an adverse affect on me!! :smiley:

It makes me want to play Diablo 2 again. Yet again. Necro has always been my favourite class.

I would actually hope that some ability, like a raise spell is in the game so i can bring my fallen back. I wouldn’t want it easy to get or use. For example, would have to have a high level white mage (I’m a FF fan) so you would not have it early game and it could possibly cost a resource, say consume 1 diamond or what not a la D&D.

Could also have some random chance to bring back the dead as a zombie by mistake so that death has some real impact (imagine you high lvl warrior coming back as a high level zombie decked out in all his high lvl gear right in the middle of your towns clinic… not good).

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As another idea… could be implemented into the versus mode?.. For example, if an enemy kills one of your units, THEY can bring them back from the dead as a zombie and vice versa. I think that’d be pretty kewl. And also you could have like a necromancer type thing to convert them back, or save their souls, and allow them to go to the afterlife, with kewl ghost voxel that shoots up into the sky. That’s my two cents anyways. ^^,

I’m in favor of the bodies just dissolving (“nice particle effect”) and leaving their loot behind. Then I can loot the battle field but I don’t have a screen covered in corpses making it hard for my villagers to get work done.

I’d love to see a cemetery or monument of some kind, though, where the fallen can be remembered. I think playing these types of games, you get attached to certain minions and you’d like to have a way to remember them even as the game goes on without them.

I think aging could have real potential for deepening gameplay. You could make the age of death adjustable so that people could keep their villagers indefinitely, but you could also incentivize the use of aging by creating an inheritance system. The inheritor could be a child if there is a birth/family mechanic, or it could be a selected citizen who “channels” (or something) the experience of the deceased to gain some of the skill of the dead villager.

And there are plenty of ways to make the aging happen and still allow for casual play. In Minecraft, a game day (sunrise to sunrise) is 20 minutes. If you extend that to a reasonable life span of 75 years, it would take more than a real-time year of playing NON-STOP before you’d see the first villager die of old age. You could adjust those times to be shorter for a more urgent game and a greater challenge, of course. It depends on what other aspects of the game involve the passage of time.

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I am so very much all for zombies. Even more so if a slain character comes back as a zombie form of that same class. Zombie Magmasmiths assualting your town with lava and a thirst for flesh.

Or… you know… zombie Farmers… with… hoes… and… a thirst for flesh. And a water can.

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