Argument for autonomous "Worker/Defense non-emotive" class of Lings

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Its been talked about a couple times in the past couple twitch streams. The question that prompts the talks generally sounds something like the following:

  • “Could we have goblins join our town?”
  • “Could we have mechanics create robots that work for our town?”
  • “Could we have do stuff for our town?”

and the answers from the devs seem to follow a similiar train of infuriating (but necessary) follow up questions like the following:

  • How would they interact with hearthlings?
  • Would they dislike/like things?
  • Would they have emotes like hearthlings?
  • Would they be locked to a workling class or could they be treated like a regular hearthling with reduced mechanics?
  • etc. weve all heard these type of questions when it comes to ANY new feature, which is great! but its also like…come on. wheres dat yay or nay were looking for!

My argument FOR an autonomous/sub-class of npcs that are destined to work for the town and be a bonus on top of the current pop. of hearthlings follows two steps.

  1. Having a robotic/crafted worker bee doesnt take away from the value of hearthlings. It in fact enhances the average hearthlings value. Instead of putting an extremely valuable and trained hearthling into dangerous situations LIKE DEFENDING THE TOWN we can instead create three(could have a max on automatons maybe?) resource hog automatons that are more suited to getting wak-a-moled by a giant goblin. We can call this my answer to “How would this class play into the current playstyle without reducing gameplay value?”
  2. Interaction, Emotes, and Animation could be solved with using the same rig as the hearthling. Nothing new should have to be created except a set of textures specific to the automatons. A solid example would be a robotic gnome from WoW. Obviously much more detailed then what I was thinking but hopefully people get the idea. When it comes to likes and dislikes Im pretty sure a specific set of traits could be assigned at the time of creation that cannot be assigned to the average hearthling. We can call this my answer to “How would this class interact with the world around it?”

Note:
I know I focused a lot on the robots but an option for the non-human characters would be to have visual variants on goblins/zombies that use the hearthling rig. Could rationalize these variants as half-breeds… examples of this in popular fantasy culture would be Lotr, D&D, and Harry Potter

I hope this topic starts a real discussion on the intended topic. Id love to see this inspire a future feature but I expect the focus for development to be on the the new building system, quest system, and world generation systems.

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Edit: With the risk of everything becoming to convoluted, I want to say this up front:
My apologies to @Servius, I misread his post. I took the interpretation of the whole post as one concept, whereas it was actually multiple idea’s with a common theme, but different nuance level. I don’t think it serves the discussion if we pin someone personally on a subject, as I try to make clear in the next two posts. But I just wanted to say explicitly that I misread his post, before anyone reads any of my response, so that I know for sure that we won’t talk about who, based on what I said, and that we instead talk about what.
I still keep my response up, because it outlines a pitfall we could all fall into in this discussion, and I want everyone to be aware of it. Just know that Servius is not to blame for anything.

With apologies,
-Niko

If it is robots, we can talk about whether they fall within the atmosphere of the game. I imagine there are possibilities, like minions of earth summoned from a geomancer.

If instead you propose other living creatures as the “whack-a-mole/worker bee” that doesn’t have the questions asked that the dev’s ask of hearthlings. For example, the goblins/zombies you mentioned. Well then you create hearthling societies with classes of second-class citizens. I reaallly doubt whether we should want that.

If you are going to ask about the intrinsic value players have for hearthlings, it would be very bad not to ask these questions for other living caracters in a town…

…especially when they are from other etnicities.

:warning:: I very much want to stress that I do not say this in a hostile manner. Just let that be out there.

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The half-breeds werent meant to be whack-a-mole/worker bee" example, my apologies for not defining them better. I really only intended this term for the worker bots. The half-breeds would be a little bit less valuable, in a game-sense, then a standard hearthling only because you can get half-breeds more frequently. Half-Breed specific traits/attributes would be a way to bring greater value to lets say, a half-orc. Maybe theyd have more health/enhanced damage for example.

There are tons of examples of half-breeds in fantasy lore.

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It is not in the terms, and I am not disturbed, but we (that is, all participants) do need to talk about this. I also don’t think it is necessarily that you inteded this, but for the quality of the conversation, we need to acknowledge an important line of nuance in this debate.

What I am concerned about is this:

‘breath’

Some of what you are suggesting is that while we have hearthlings, which have feelings, likes/dislikes and thoughts, that we can also have other groups of citizens, which is okay. But then you are suggesting that these groups of citizens do not have to have thoughts, likes, dislikes and feelings. There, we go into racist territory. ***

I don’t want to say you wanted to end up here, I don’t doubt that. But in this discussion we must recognise that the discussion overlaps some racist territory. I want to talk about this in a non-personal way.

I think we can have other entinicies in our towns (I’d like that, actually). I think they can have different thoughts/likes/dislikes/feelings than hearthlings do (again, sounds fun, especially when they sometimes break those patterns, which hearthlings also could do). But they need to have thoughts, likes/dislikes and feelings, and can’t be more dehumanised that hearthlings themselves. That is where the nuance line lies.

Having said that, there is also plenty of discussion territory that is far away from this nuance line. I mentioned minions from earth and stone, (there was another name for this, but I can’t remember). I think we mustn’t shy away from this nuance line, either, as long as we all know excaclty that it’s there. That is why I mentioned this, and nothing else.

P.S. I even believe we must be able to talk about where exaclty that line lies. This requires from all partoes involved to do even more their best not to take things personally, but it should be possible.

P.P.S *** Oh, I misread your post. You didn’t actually mention that these etnicities don’t need feelings and stuff. I thought that because you show frustration with the dev’s questions about these feelings and stuff, so that’s why I though that. I apologise.

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Not exactly sure when I said Likes/Dislikes/Thoughts weren’t appropiate for half-breeds. (just saw you re-read it. Ignore this :stuck_out_tongue: )

Ethnicity, btw, is the incorrect term for this discussion. Half-Breeds ie offspring of a hearthling and a goblin would fall under the term of “Species”. So would the following:

  • Elves
  • Goblins
  • Orcs
  • Trolls

Each are biologically different from a human ie fundamentally different in evolution(or lack there of). In Lotr lore Orcs are Elves that were tortured by demons till the “good” traits of the elf were destroyed and all that was left was the dark and twisted Orc.

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Personally, I am strictly against adding autonomous machinery. The fact that the turrets are “self-driving” already bothers me a lot. I have always seen Stonehearth as this cutesy fantasy world where people whack goblins with swords and magic and stuff, and as such, high-tech sentient robots/turrets seem so out of place.

I would prefer if the machinery created by the engineer were “Hearthling-controlled,” so turrets would have to be handled by a hearthling. No high-tech robots please!

Now that I’ve made it obvious that robots are a big no for me, we’re left with 3 more things.

  • Tamed animals
  • Magic based sentient creatures (Summoned golems and stuff)
  • Other sentient races (Rabbits, Goblins, Orcs, etc)

Tamed animals

Animals fighting along with their owners is nothing new. Big beasts being thrown into combat to wreck some enemies, hounds helping thier owners beat an opponent… we’ve probably all seen or heard of that.

Heck! Goblins do that already with their wolves!

This is one of the things which could be made in terms of “non-hearthling” fighters. We could have a Beast Master class whose job would be to train such animals, and then they would help defending the town.

In peace time they would interact with Hearthlings, and obviously they would have to be fed.

Creatures summoned with magic

This is a very common thing in fantasy. Powerful sorcerers summoning big golems to battle, or small golems to do their menial tasks, animating weapons and stuff, or even just creating mirror images of themselves. There are so many options.

Creatures like these are most likely “brainless” and would probably need zero interaction with Hearthlings. They would eat no food, and would not need to sleep. When they are killed in combat, the summoner could simply summon another. Sounds awfully overpowered if put like this.

Of course, if it was so easy, why would anyone bother with real Hearthlings? There would have to be a limit of some sort, like:

  • An upkeep cost. A magical substance or something.
  • Limited number of creatures per summoner.
  • Each summon would last a limited time.

But this doesn’t just end here…

What do these summoned creatures do?
Do they fight? Do they help with tasks in the town? Both? How efficient are they at it?

  • Once we involve magic, there’s really no reason why we can’t have both fighter and laborer summoned creatures.
  • But obviously, these would have to be less efficient than your average Hearthling, otherwise everyone would just mass-produce these creatures and let their Hearthlings idle all day and night.

What does the summoner do?
Is it a new class? If so, is it a combat class? If not a combat class, then what other things they do?

  • To be fair, nothing dictates that summons would have to be strictly limited to just one class. We could have a wizard class who would have a golem companion to aid them in battle, and we could also have a Herbalist who accidentally mixed the wrong herbs and summoned a flower golem or something who helps tending the garden or whatever.
  • Introducing a class just for the sake of having a magic pet is obviously not a good idea. The class as a whole needs a purpose, it needs to fill a void. “Oh, we have no magic combat class yet? … let’s add a wizard who can also summon minions.” sound way better than “I want a magic minion, let’s add a class.”

Other sentient races

The first question we want to ask here is: Why would they want to join?

  • Are they cast out by their tribe? If so, is it really wise to have a person who isn’t liked by their own? What guarantees that they won’t make problems here?
  • Their homeland was destroyed, and they need a new home? Well that sounds reasonable. But will they jump ship the moment a tribe of their own race passes by?
  • They left home to seek adventures? But if so, can we expect them to travel further at some point, seeking more adventurous adventures?

Once we have all settled and our new guy/gal signed a contract that they won’t make troubles and won’t ever leave, we can head on to the next question…

How will they fit in?

  • Can we expect our own Hearthlings to accept this weird newcomer?
  • Can we expect this newcomer to respect the rules of our town?

We can color it as much as we want, and even throw it under the rug and try to forget, but it is very much part of human nature to have prejudices. Our Hearthlings would likely get suspicious of this weird little guy who calls himself a goblin, and likely wouldn’t trust him at first. Over time perhaps they would get used to him, and would learn to like him.

And then we have our little goblin who has come from a vastly different culture than what the Hearthlings have. At first he would probably cause some troubles, steal things (as goblins do) and be a mischievous little creature, etc… This would probably annoy the Hearthlings until the goblin learns to behave.

What would the newcomer do as part of the town?
Tricky question, huh?

First let’s have a look at what goblins do right now.

  • They sit around their campfire doing nothing.
  • They occasionally sneak into our town, wreaking havoc.

Well… not helpful is it?
First we would need to establish what sort of roles a goblin society in Stonehearth would have. From what we have now:

  • Worker goblins
  • Fighter goblins (Leather armor / red armor)
  • Ninja goblins in pijamas

Apart of these, their societly would probably consist of things like:

  • shaman (well, every tribe has a shaman)
  • cooks (they probably eat)
  • weaponmakers (because they have weapons)
  • hunters (for food and leather for clothes)
  • clothmakers (since they aren’t naked)
  • beast masters (because they have those wolves)

So what I intend to say is that a different race would probably be able to take tasks what their society already has.

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Although you wouldn’t say this. Goblins don’t use the same rig as hearthlings, goblins have ears, for instance. I don’t know whether they can use the same rigs, but @malley would probably know. I believe malley also said on stream he wanted to add bunny ears to the hearthling rig, which would have no bones in them for hearthlings, of course, so maybe there is that.

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The idea would be for the rig to be 100% the same as the hearthlings. The visual traits that would differentiate between a standard goblin and a half-goblin would be textures (maybe an off green-color) and/or hair replacements that are horns/pointed ears.

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For your discussion on Other Sentient Races I would like to point out my suggestion is not for 100% full goblins/elves/trolls etc to join the town. Im leaning towards half-hearthling-half-goblin citizens that join because they are recognizable by our hearthlings without being as complex as integrating a “culturally” different full goblin.

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But what if they don’t, that could also be a way to balance them against hearthlings. Although it could also fall under upkeep (the psychological kind) that you mentioned. What I thinking is not brainless golems, but golems with very little, albeit non-zero, brain and personality.

Do all goblins steal?, or do only some goblins steal, why do I know so little about the goblins? Argh. :stuck_out_tongue:

On the matter of prejudice, we can have traits that make hearthlings more/less likely to talk to outsiders of any kind. More open-hearted/mided hearthlings, (people with high spirit, preferably), will most likely talk to newcomers, and tell the others that he/she isn’t so bad. The goblin on the other hand learns more about the culture each time he talks with someone inside that culture.

Good, point. But in that case I’d love to see some goblins getting a passionate trait. Maybe their society doesn’t have clerics, and as soon as the goblin sees a cleric do his/her job, the goblin is like, I want that to be my job.

That could be a way to avoid lot’s of hassle.

Another way is newcomers get some time inside to see what it is like, what the culture is like, what kind of things they want to learn to do, and then decide whether they could live in this culture, provided that the cultrue learns how to live with him. (It needs to come from both sides, right.) Maybe some newcomers decided that a different society is better for them.

Maybe each newcomer observes the town before the game notifies you of his/her presence. In that case, you make this a non-issue, as the goblin’s join notification starts with, “I have observed your town for a few days, and I would like to ask for asylum in your town” or something along those lines (obviously depending on the reason of immigration,).

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A fantastic example of automatons in a fantasy world can be found here wtih a more specific explanation for how they work being found here. The overarching idea is parts are both mechanical and magical. I think its basically just a golem with a more advanced body.

“function on steam power and magic, and usually require a soul”

Could be a way to “save” hearthlings that have died in battle.

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I want to start by showing this:

Automotons in Frost Punk will serve as the workforce for a building. That said, the same ideal could be brought to Stonehearth. “Drone” workers could automate workshops, freeing up workers. Not to mention they could produce 24/7 without the need of food.

Personally, I can see the geomancer creating golems or the engineer creating automotons.

I’m in agreence with this one. Having another race, regardless of who they are, doing drone work is (in another light) slave labor. Now I’m all for enslaving goblins that are trying to kill me. But for once, I don’t feel this would fit with the cutesyness of the game.

I’m actually against the idea of half-breeds. Sorry, but the idea of a hearthling getting it on with an Orc kinda throws me off…

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Half-Orc
^Half human-Half Orc.

The concept of interbreeding might not be inherently attractive to you buts its something thats come up in every major Fantasy series, including Lotr, WoW, Star Trek/Wars, ES, etc. I think functionality wise the concept of half-breeds opens up some unique stories and gameplay.

Im not sure Niko completley read my statement on half-breeds but at no point did I state that they should be seen as second class. A half-orc would be better suited to battle 100% because of enhanced strenth over a standard hearthling, a half-elf might be better at archery, crafting, speed, or just skill learning due to strait up magical enhancements.

and might I point out that all these different groups are not separate races but separate species. An example of a race in a fantasy environment would be a Light Elf and Dark Elf. They are both Elven but are different races of Elf.

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You talked about a wide range of subjects, from bots (who can do drone work) to other species, so I think you should be in the clear. Enfin, I already apologized.

What you are saying is that because they are different species, their anatomies can be different. And that, you argue, is potentially an unignorable factor as to what jobs they excell in.
I still believe that doesn’t clear the need for caution, but I also find it somewhat reasonable (it is based in fact).
I do however think that if you’re going to say this, as in, maybe half-orcs are better suited for combat for example. Then half-orcs must be able to get every job in the combat field, from drone professions to professions with high respect and responsibity. This is all because you keep the cutesy atmosphere of the game intact by saying that other creatures are not better/worse, but just different.

The second thing I would like to add is this: If you have non-hearthlings woth different traits/stuff, then some of those non-hearthlings will have hearthling traits, and some hearthlings will have the non-hearthling traits, some non-hearthlings have the traits that other non-hearthling species have. I don’t think it is mandatory, but my respect for the mechanics scale with how deeply this feature would be implemented.

If this is how it is done, my judgement would say that stonehearth would have avoided the pitfall quite nicely.

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I like this thread… or at least where it is heading :smiley: Please make all the animations that hearthlings have, for the goblins!

About the automations… @Stmpnk this sounds like something you would want to engage in?

I come to think about pinocio, the wooden boy?

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Goblins cannot use the same rigs as hearthlings simply because their proportions are different. Goblins also have ears and mouths, but its mainly that they are smaller and we want them to be small. Switching goblins to the hearthling rig would mean they would be the same size as hearthlings - and would loose something inherent to what they are : ). They would also look pretty close to Orcs at that point - which do use the Hearthling rigs. Kobolds and Bunnies also use the hearthling rigs. For Bunnies we would like to add ears for them, and now that we know we have more bones, we can simply add them to the base hearthling rig and simply not have them show up on hearthlings while they do for Bunnies (though that is a chunk of work, not sure if/when we would do that).

As for any sort of racism, I think you guys are on the right track - we want to avoid those sorts of analogies. We may have stories where we look at one group of people being treated improperly by another and asking the player to help everyone be treated equally (or something like that), but we probably won’t go into the really heavy stuff like “racism” directly.

As for half-breeds, we actually haven’t even discussed this yet… just never came up. I’m not against it personally, but if we did anything with this, I don’t think we’d do it on a scale of an ‘entire people’, but maybe a unique npc or something (individuals)? I dunno, I’ll mention it to the team.

In general, I think we want to make sure that anyone who joins the town is able to interact with everyone as “people” - which includes conversations, loves/likes/dislikes, traits, etc. We may end up giving them different classes or limiting their class selection, but those we feel fall into the territory of culture and learning - not equality or representation. That being said, we may still at some point give a class (geomancer or other) the ability to craft an automaton of some sort who would not have these extra interactions, but they would probably be closer to a pet (which still has the emote_cute conversation with hearthlings). We would want to make sure that they aren’t completely autonomous so that they still feel like a part of your town. And while a golem may not feel emotion, the person who created it certainly still does - and we would want to give them the opportunity to share that emotion and create connections ; ).

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:scream: just noticed the title next to your name. @malley thanks for the response!

Exactly why half-breeds would be a simple solution. Basically a hearthling model textured green/brown/gray with no new bones, just different hair options. The ears+horns could even be hair replacements. Doing it like this would be synonymous with the animals seen in the devblog the other day. Several animals of different shades/slight variation able to share the same rig because they are more or less the same in terms of size and anim set. Ive yet to listen to the devblogs enough to know if sharing a rig requires that the anim set be the same accross all iterations of animals on that rig, if this is not the case simple things like the idle anim could be altered to differentiate lings and half-breeds in large groups.

For multi-class interaction automatons could be finalized by the geomancer but could have its gears+parts created by the engineer. Similar to how the altars are made to get to tier 2 town(have to have resources crafted from three high level crafters to actually complete the altar) In the devblog we saw those glowy rune stones, could def be mined as a resource for the geomancer to craft the automaton. This combination of magic and machine would make the automaton in fact a type of golem.

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I agree with this for turrets. I think they should work as an improved, but stationary weapon for civilians. Robots is a different thing though. It’s common enough in fantasy (at least cute/unrealistic fantasy) that anything mechanical that has the shape of a human or animal will more or less automatically have some level of intelligence. I’m not saying that Stonehearth should have robots, just that it’s more ok than the automatic turrets.
The problem I have with robots is that I (currently) don’t see a good reason to limit how many you can build. If you can build them. If you get them through quests then that’s a different story. Someone said something about taking the soul from a fallen hearthling to make a robot/golem. The problem with that is that players would kill hearthlings to build robots/golems and still get new hearthlings since the town has room for them.

The version I would suggest is to have golems, fueled by magic. They take about a day to build and charge and one charge lasts for 1 to 3 days. That way one low level golem builder can have 2 golems at the same time. One working and the other recharging. At top level they can have 3 working and 1 recharging. Or something like that.
A new golem always starts out as a very basic one that can only do simple tasks but can work day and night. They don’t get experience from working, but each time they are recharged the builder takes some time to make improvements (a higher level builder makes the improvements faster) so the longer you have a golem the more advanced and hearthling-like it will become. The player could be given the opportunity the choose if it should be specialized at something. How well it hits that goal depends on the skill of the builder. As it improves it can acquire personality traits and again, it depends on the skill of the builder if the traits are good or bad.
If a golem is destroyed you need to build a new, basic one, but then your builder is hopefully at a higher level so the new one will improve faster.
To stop the player from making every hearthling a golem builder (if that is a potential problem) you could say that only hearthlings with a magic trait can make them.
I’m not saying that golem builder should be it’s own class. It could be what you have the geomancer for when you are done moving mountains. The kickstarter description of the geomancer even mentions golems.

Love this idea. :smiley: It should be kept as a rare accident though.

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How is this different from people that kill their 'lings to get gravestones for decoration, or because they didn’t like their stats?

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This i know is a thing coming in the form of Golems from the Geomancer. Idk if they will be timed, but i do know they will work and defend in town

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