I guess I think too small.
I was just thinking maybe they could either leave corpses behind the the option of setting some land aside as a graveyard, bury the dead, with a tombstone to their memory, and move on.
My point was that you could still have an aging mechanic even if you wanted to play casual. I think a year of real-time playing non-stop before reaching old age is unreasonable for normal play. I think 20 minutes/per day is a little too slow a pace. Itâd take about 5 hours just to complete one year and if you made crops grow at a real-life rate of 3-4 month, itâd be a couple of hours before you could harvest your first crop. That is too âFacebook game-yâ for my tastes.
Throm Burlyhands has me even more excited to have some sort of inheritance mechanic. Whether they figure out how to implement children and families or the channeling to an existing villager, it doesnât matter. He could be âThrom, son of Ned, . . .â or âThrom, disciple of Ned the Great, come to avenge the death of my master upon all those who threaten the city he gave his life to defend.â (It is shorter and he is less likely to be shot by an orc while he is reciting it.) 
Itâs a shame I cannot like this more than once. But rest assured I liked the sh*t out of it.
Hmmm Iâm against an aging populace. I think this should not turn into a God-sim, but a city and rpg sim. Go on adventures, grow your town, build and sell equipment, hold festivals. Keep it complex in detail but simple in focus.
Burying dead, dealing with pregnancies and children, having to control birth rate, requiring protestors for abortion vs birth debate, garbage leading to infestation of rats and fleas, wood rotting in the rain without the proper primer on first, worrying about environmental omissions, having to clean battlefields of the dead with screaming and crying widows and children running from home only to have to create a psychiatrist class to help deal with loss and reintegrate into societyâŚ
Yeah. No thanks. No aging. Children until level 3-5, then adults. Higher level classes have a bit of white or gray in their hair. Good enough. Keep it simple.
I think 24 min for a typical day would be perfect (considering you can speed time while building). I donât want to see my guys spend 3 days building a house or two. 10 min of daylight, 8 min of night, 3 min of sunset and morning each. A minute for every hour. Have a year be 4 months, with one month for each season.
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And have all the gravestones and memorials you like. I just donât think itâs necessary to drag back the corpse of your favourite character, dump out some soil, place his body in it and bury him. Itâs a clever little thing you think will be lots of funâŚbut will be used once or twice and dropped.
Someone dies, their voxels explode and equipment drops. You come back, put up a gravestone in your cemetery with their name on it. Great. Hold a parade if you like. But no dead bodies please. Thatâs my vote.
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I canât quite see any of those things being in the game myself ⌠I understand your concerns and the more I think about it the less attracted to the idea of ageing (both in reality and in the game) I am, but if ageing was in, it should definitely be toggle on/off. I would personally only use it in a peaceful setting, experiencing what goes with it, I think it could become too cumbersome to maintain a settlement and the ages of your settlers - potentially enjoyable, but possibly infuriating when your master smith dies from a heart attack leaving you with wooden swords and dreams.
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This is why I think some sort of inheritance system could be really nice to have, even without aging.
Your master smith dies because he was wandering outside when he should have been inside crafting and a goblin got him. Now your facing the goblin hordes with wooden swords. But if there were some kind of inheritance, then the master smithâs pupil could gain some of the master smiths skills and give your town a fighting chance.
You could make it have diminishing returns (e.g. a pupil only inherits a few of the masterâs skills) so that people couldnât abuse it to make an ubermensch. Iâve seen something similar implemented in a game with permadeath to great effect. It eases the pain of a momentâs distraction while allowing choices to maintain serious consequences.
Hmm, I personally donât agree with this idea of âinheritanceâ. Apprenticeships and the ability to act as a mentor, potentially increasing exp growth I am completely down with, but if your master smith dies through combat or carelessness, well, isnât that just the way it goes?
The fact that everything is pretty much mod-able means that with any luck there should be something for everyoneâs tastes available.
I personally would quite like death from old age (means you have to plan for the future). I also like the idea of persistent corpses, can you imagine after a large battle, you would need to bury your dead and burn the enemy corpses unless you want disease to spread or worse restless dead. 
I can see your point. Iâd like to see something like inheritance implemented well in a game that has some persistence like Stonehearth. I didnât really care for Torchlightâs âYour can pass on this item that your new character canât use yet.â Iâm a much bigger fan of passing on skills or experience, like the descendent of a master soldier might have a slightly higher combat stat. But this would probably go better in Radiantâs future project. The one where you get to play a single character in the towns youâve developed in Stonehearth.
Hi,
I am fine if aging is not in the game, no babys, no weddings, no natural deaths etc. Simplifies things. Lets face it, makes it quite complicated and burdensome otherwise.
However i would love to have corpses in the game, so i can build a graveyard or crypt for fallen heroes/units. With all that crafting and probably small population count i am sure the one knight in mythical armor that you took care for through a lot of levels will be quite dear to you once he dies in battle.
Just having him disappear and fading away would be disappointing for me.
Well there is obviously a way to increase population, that means babies at least. Babies mean old age as otherwise there is the dual problem of late game over population when your cities expanding faster than is viable and master of everything becomes very, very possible.
Like any other game with mods⌠There will be someone who will make a mod changing the seasons, the time flow and the population growth.
I can remember reading somewhere that population cap is tied up with food production. (that can be modded too)
So in itâs simplest form every season a new person will arrive in the world. Gnomoria Style - from the edge of the map - up to your maximum allowed population.
Then a new mod can be scripted to make those new people not settlers arriving but babies being born and needing training, etcâŚ
Remember folks⌠You can script it.
Scripting Community Allows Modifications (S.C.A.M.)
Independent of aging, which is a whole different can of worms, there will obviously be deaths because there will be battles and other events leading to people dying.
Well - just lately an ongoing debate about muslim(compatible) graveyeards within europe came to my attention and even though largely the differences are not so huge its many details causing trouble. This beautifully shows how differently cultures handle their dead people.
Bearing this in mind, should we get deities and people have beliefs then there should be different approaches to taking care of the dead.
While no religion is âinventedâ people might just vanish at the spot they are dying at, but not inventing a spiritual approach and ignoring the dead maybe could have repercussions.
If we get to the 450K we could get a festival similar to new years eve, where in real life many cultures scare away evil spirits by making loud noises and having fireworks.
Miss that event too many times and the spirits of your dead might come back to⌠hmmm have a friendly party? Or something a bit more disastrous 
Or if there would be necromancers it would probably be very handy for them to have the dead lying all over the place ready to be raised for maximum havoc (either for or against oneself?).
Suddenly praying to a deity that involves fire funerals or funerals on sea seems like a pretty good idea to control what happens with dead bodies.
But that is all stuff for the future and if it contradicts the general direction of the game its not too important to have, still imagine a mixed beliefs city, where after a battle the graveyeards grow, burial ships take to sea and burial fires are lit.
If one does not like it, then just dont explore this area of the tech tree, but it would add massive depth and would make the toll a battle had very visible.
Oh but everything in this regard really should be optional, either by setting options (general or mapwise), or by making it dependent on available classes and tech.
Having one certain kind of system forced on the user feels generally wrong.
Then I would just be all for people just vanishing and thats it.
In my opinion, death adds depth. While we donât want our soldiers and villagers dieing, when one dies, either by combat or starvation (for example), having the body dissapear just gets rid of a problem cities have, which is what to do with the body. If you leave a dead body long enough in a place without proper care, it will decompose and start infecting people near it (bacterias and such).
Imagine a battlefield, laid waste with bodies. You have some choices:
- Leave the bodies for nature to take care, and start seeing the pile up of diseases, but soil in the battlefield is better for crops (nutrients and stuff). Make bodies that are left more then 1 week create a 3x3 disease area around them that can be caught by anyone except certain classes that are dedicated to body disposal. Enemy bodies can simply be torched, leaving some bones in the area for some extra time.
- Dispose of the bodies, by cremating them on a special building or burieing your villages corpses on a cemitery. Cremating disposes of corpses efficiently, but doesnât allow for monuments (lets just say that an entombed legendary hero body would be a nice mini boss if âsomeoneâ decided to reanimate it =x), and cemiteries are very nice to have in a city.
- Just burn all corpses after the battle, just in case.
Life and death in such a game as Stonehearth, where magic exists, is needed. Maybe having some godly magic that revives 1 combatant you like or something is nice as well, which needs the body to remain for a certain time.
As for the infant thing, I donât mind villagers having 4 stages of life:
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Babies (barely leave the house, must have a mother nurturing it)
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Adolescent (Leave the house, but does not make ANY work, stays with father, mother or worker that have a working job so he can learn)
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Adult (performs a job and has children according to the rules above).
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Elderly (Still performs a job, but starts to have some problems - Longer hours of sleep, less fatigue to work, but can teach adolescents much faster due to experience).
Each life stage should have a predetermined days/months cycle (6 months baby, 6 months adolescent, 3 years adult, 2 years eldery, just point out a proportion, donât know how time will affect people in game), but as for transformation from babies, to adolescent and so forth, a simple DING and voxel format change would suffice. Thereâs no need for complex transformations from a 6 year old to a 10 year old, as it would consume too many resources (for immersionâs sake, but I prefer more systems).
When the elderly dies, a gravedigger goes for the corpse, carries it to the cemitery (or cremates it) and digs the grave, leaving a nice place for the deceased (which would be a nice hook for some evil deity to use the corpse as a skeletal warrior for moar trouble =P). And a priest goes for some annointment for the recently dead, with the family mourning.
All in all, corpse disposal is an important aspect of the game (imagine how evil one player must be to throw diseased ridden corpses against enemies on catapult =P), it adds another layers to the game, and some management is necessary for it NOT to be a con. I think it would be nice.
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I donât think an inheritance system should be in. Unless a unit was in-training of some sorts. If your master smith dies of illness and you are facing the hordes with wooden swords, that may just have to be the way the cookie crumbles.
I donât think aging as such should be in the game, too much worrying and micro managing, and I think there would be enough other ways for your civilization to starve and die to worry about. As far as population increase, that could easily be done in a way similar to people joining your camps like Dwarf Fortress.
That being said, if you had like, a master or super unit who made a significant contribution to your empire, and you were able to honor him with a statue or something, that would be awesome.
Exactly. Iâm surprised with all this aging and corpse handling talk. If you like a unit, take care of it! Give him/her a personal bodyguard! If they die, train someone else up or have two of that profession. Seems simple enough.
And regarding corpses on battlefields, I am imagining the scene and I would think âwhat is this doing in this game?â Itâs a colorful world of cute characters and you have to worry about dragging corpses home? Not only does it not fit the aesthetic of the game at all, it would be a âhey thatâs a cool featureâ for people who were interested once or twice and never used again. Itâs like adding a feature where after rain, all wood buildings and equipment begin to rot and mold. Hey thatâs cool! 3 hours in: this is really annoying.
And I disagree with the aging as well. Keep the focus on building, resources and modded encounters. This is waaaaay too much micromanagement.
I think the key thing to remember is that this is a city building and rpg adventure game. Not a war sim.
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Generally speaking, most old people require less sleep than they once did, same with food. I donât mind people getting older but dying of old age would be obnoxious. Imagine you have a master smith at lvl 83 or whatever and just as he becomes high enough level to make some badass magic sword, he dies of old age⌠It leaves you with a catch 22 also, you want time to move fast enough for buildings and crops to be finished but at the same time, you wouldnât want time moving fast because your population keeps expiring. Aging debuffs are great for the RPG side of things but they ruin the RTS side of things. Yea itâs interesting that my soldier that Iâve had since the creation of my village is now too old to move without a cane but it really screws up my tactics when a titan shows up and my soldier has a cane in his shield hand.
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Agreed! I like the idea of the first 3-5 levels or so for a unit, theyâre a child and canât change professions and are weak fighters and so must level up as apprentices (help build, help squire soldiers in large groups, help craftsman and smiths).
In fact, click on a craftsman and the apprentice will automatically improve build speed by 5% or so while graphically, theyâre running around in the shops or reading books or going to get materials. That way, itâs always good to have your higher level guys have an apprentice toiling away with them.
Once they hit level five, they can equip items and change professions and start contributing. You could even have a profession for mentors and teachers (schools?) who can take on multiple apprentices at once and their apprentices graduate and have access to certain job trees sooner (engineer, doctor, alchemist).
But thatâs the extent of age related gameplay Iâd like to see. Maybe after level 60, your characterâs hair grays a bit but no gameplay changes whatsoever.
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