Savegame coop / passive multiplayer

Remember Anno 1404? You start with a basic village on an island, build up your industry and the village grows, also the villagers needs do. But the resources are limited by the given biome also by the technological standard of your kingdom, to get access to new reources and other goods, you colonize new biomes and start building up new villages using the technology of other cultures. So you start shipping exotic and basic goods among your colonies and create a working economy, whether the system succeds depends on the management of the player(s).
In Stonehearth additional cultures and biomes are already in work or atleast planned, but except in an active multiplayer (several players working on 1 map in the same session), we will never have access to 100% of the gamecontent playing on one single map/save using one culture.
So my suggestion is to immitate the trading among the islands, handling each mapsave as an island. Somekind of a passive coop-gameplay.
You start your first mapsave, build up a village and once you’ve enough hearthlings and wealth, you can choose one as a trader, equipe him with trading goods and choose the items you want to recieve for them. The trader will leave the map and stay inactive at this status. Now you can start a new map/save (or load an existing one) using the culture and biome you want, just the same procedure we already know, with a simple detail that after a few days a trader will appear offering the goods and asking for payment you chose on the first save you created. After a successfull exchange of goods the trade will leave this map and will be inactive again. Now you load again map/save number 1, wait a few days and your trader will appear bringing the stuff you asked for. Ofcourse you can send out the trader with random destination (free trade) or an exact destination for cases when mutiple saves exist.
Technically would seperate savedatas appear: one for each map and one for all traders. Loading a map also loads the traders data. So actually the player is creating his own economy, balancing it by consuming and producing the goods by his own. Aside the balanced trades, this system could be expanded to a passive multiplayer session. 2 players start a passive session, each one is playing his own map but with synced traders. They don’t have direct influence on the maps but can help eachother by asking and offering goods.

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i support some of the idea,this is the same thing that Anno 2205 did but i would still preffer a real multiplayer experience that most city building have lost i know not alot of people will play the multiplayer but what If some people decided too.trading is fun and all but the excitement of watching 2/3/4 kingdoms build to become a metropolis full with hearthlings is just Beautiful i dont know the words to express it.but yes as i said i will support this post it would open a little aspect of the multiplayer between players in the community.

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So what you’re talking about is sort of like how EA’s game, Spore, did it? (though, preferably much better :stuck_out_tongue: )

In that I mean, in their game world, you had the galaxy, and you could pick a planet for your creatures to evolve and develop on, then if you started another planet and travelled to that original planet during space age, you were able to meet your own created race, and y’know, trade, become allies, that jazz?
i.e. Similar concept, but islands and with full trade ability between them until you made an essential empire without directly being in the same map as the other players?
And then, in the multiplayer sense, integrating it to have independent player worlds linked over online to indirectly involve themselves in other players worlds and have them indirectly involve themselves with theirs, i.e. through trading with other players? (Or an online marketing system)

Or have I misinterpreted entirely? :sweat_smile:

uhm much smaller dimensions and no constant uploads from player side. I’ve played spore but wasn’t exited about their system, since you always developed in one direction and had no resource cycles.
The basic idea is to create economic links between your worlds, without being on one map. So i can keep up playing all new biomes and kingdoms seperately, while still being able to profit from my old saves. I play my ascedants on my map and my girlfried plays rayya her map, we both want to trade with each other some special goods. But yet we don’t have multiplayer and even if it existed we aren’t able to play at the same time, so even if we start up a 2 player map, we both have to play it at the same time…

Yeah, I was referring to the basic gist of the idea. EA managed to screw it up royally. (Though, goodness knows how they managed to screw it ‘that’ badly… :confused: )

I’d imagine if such a thing were to be implemented, it’d be much later in development stage, during the multiplayer implementation, or even after. But that’s just my take on it, don’t take that as gospel. :slight_smile:

Perhaps even working civilisations in different cells of the same map generated at new game might be an idea, where you choose the cells on different parts of the map to settle each tribe in a local world, rather than a whole new world in its entirety. (And a special mixed biome map, perhaps, for access to both sides of the biomes and resources, more or less specifically for that idea)

well the cell part reminds me dungeonkeeper or total war map, where you select your battleground and order some little tasks. I also thought about that, but i think it would be a lil bit too much, since the focus is to play several hours on one map, managing a tiny village and not a whole world.Well it will depend how they implement it, so i’m not against that.
I also expect Stonehearth to have a ton of biome and tribe specific/exclusive stuff. So all parts get their special spice and people will try out everything of the game. But in most cases the extra “spice” is always endgame and people get bored to play the basics over and over again. Having such trading system is an option to get access to the complete content using teamwork or your own spend time.

btw. ea scew up, because they spend so much time and money on new 1000% working copy protection…

I hope they make a multiplayer that allows to build together making giant villages instead off a couple of villages together.

That way you make it more interactive foor groups of players in my opinion. I do like the trading with players idea, but would prefer that all items are collectible, if just a bit more diffecult so that trading would still be a good option if you don’t want to put the time and effort in getting it yourself

I actuall don’t know whether they plan a coop building or 2 seperate village multiplayer.

Well all items to be collectible is pretty boring. Cactee spawning in the forest or mushrooms in dry desert don’t make sense and kill the idea behind the biomes. Also if you compare the 2 tribes we have some gameplay differences. rayya are made to be played in the desert and the ascendents for mild climate biomes. Each of them got their own “art” style too. Additionaly the ascendant potter should get more ascenden fitting clay items and furniture…

And actally my personall wish was to connect singleplayer worlds and being able to get access to all stuff, without playing one big map with all resouurces on it.

Well i dont mean all in the same biome, just that with enough time (walking will take allong time) you will be able to get it yourself. I’m just saying players should not be forced to use trading sytem, or when multiplayer has a low number off active players that supply the resource needed. I mean if you have to wait several days for an item to be available…

Forced? at the current state of the game you got no access to 100% of the content, no matter how you play. And even in the future you would need a giant map with all biomes and all culture would need the ability to craft everything. Which is probably contraproductive if you think that the developers wanted to create different playstyles with biomes and cultures.
Even if the developer manage to keep working a giant map with all biomes and stuff (which is hard to realize), why should rayya people, who are a desert adapted tribe, craft and build exactly the same items like the ascendants? Or the other way round why should ascendants have crafting recipes for things which don’t grow in their natural habitat?Trading technology and resources is definetely a better feature, so you start with certain amount of fitting recipes and items and if you want access to other stuff you’ll have to trade.
Talking about resource supply, just reread the thread, i was suggesting it as main feature for people who want to enrich their singleplayer world by trading with their other worlds or if available with their friends. I’m not suggesting a resource cloud for the ppl.

the devs stated early on in development that they planned for maps to be so expansive that, if there IS an “edge”, that you won’t be able to find it.

right now that’s not the case. which makes sense, since it’s an alpha right now, and a map that size (or, if infinite [like minecraft], variable size) would wreck any computer.

right now you can’t build everything, and that’s ok since it’s still an early state, but eventually it’s planned to be able to reach anything if you walk far enough. there should also be several different biomes that offer the same stuff (ie. you can get sand in a desert, or sand from the beach). now, they might have changed that plan since, but as I’ve stated it several times and haven’t been told that those plans have changed, I believe they are still going to go through with this closer to release. because everything will be on one big map, having the locked “islands” (I’m assuming you’re referring to what simcity tried to do with the 2kmx2km squares that weren’t connected, right?) would be a redundant solution.

that said, obviously you won’t have one big city that encompasses the globe. you should have individual cities at some point, walled off on their own with “wilderness” in between. there will probably be trade caravans that you can control to allow resource-sending to your own settlements or resource trading between other players (or, I guess, yourself, if you wanna ship glass from your desert to your plains in exchange for farm crops, which is a good thing to do)

First of all even if you start playing with one culture on a really big map with lots of different biomes, you’ll have to deal with cultural limits, they got their own style, their prefered food etc. So there have to be differences between the cultures, right?
Like in settler 4, you had 4 cultures: the vikings, the romans, the mayans and the trojans. Mainly the gameplay was pretty similar, but vikings build mainly wooden structures, trojans and mayans mainly stone, while the romans used wood and stone in balance. So you had to plan where to build and how to focus your economy. (ascendants use mainly wood, while the rayya got the potter as their main crafter = different gameplay)
Such differences created new playstyles and ofcourse every culture had their own style of buildings, items, decorations and equipement. Also other small differences existed like food preferences, vikings grew pigs for meat, romans sheep and trojans geese (same gamemechanic but different animals) or different sacrifces for their gods, vikings sacrificed met, mayans tequila, romans wine and trojans sunflower oil. But each of these items had their own way of production:
agave grew only in the desert, honey could be gathered on flower fields but the met brewery requiered additionaly water as resource, wine was produced directly in the winery (=faster than the others) etc…
So if we think further, we got a random map and choose a culture and start playing, we will settle in the most fitting area. After a while our village grow and we search for new resources and other goods we don’t have. To build a whole new village for few resources is pretty much of a waste, since our gui is designed for one village and having a giant active zone because of it requires a lot of hardware for a pretty small feature. And even if we get to manage a second village we still play the same culture, so we’ll need a source of tradable items to get access to other cultures items, right? With my suggestion, i wanted to connect singlplayer worlds, so people can play different maps with different cultures and enrichen these worlds at the same time, but without interacting directly. It’s not a replacement for a direct multiplayer.

Just imagine i start 1 map with the ascendants and a 2nd one with rayya, i play them individually at a different time, but i can trade among them.

I have a question about your idea. From what i read ( correct me if i’m wrong) You want different production systems with each having there own recipes for each culture.

My question would be will the trading be limited to produced goods like clay windows or pottery storage box. Because if you can’t produce it through the lack of recipe, you would not have a use for the raw materials of a different biome. Only the items already made would be tradeble for use in a different culture, making zones that would like nice in your village like having chinatown in london.

If you would want to trade the raw materials specific to that biome to use in recipes then you have to be able to get them yourself i would think if only allot harder to get. Trading them would still be quicker and more benifitial (i’m sure i did not spell that correctly)

Well the developers already started to work in this direction:
The potter and the carpenter, they craft the same stuff with the same functions, but use different resources. It’s basicly repainted content. So except for a few specific items and the decorations, their is no real reason to use the potter as ascendant or the carpenter as rayya, right? It doesn’t add much of new gameplay and adds some logical issues. Why would the rayya waste wood for things they already crafted out of clay. So a rayya carpenter needs a pretty basic catalog of usefull furniture and “rayyan styled”, which can’t be produced by the potter or the mason (wood = rare resource in the desert) and the ascendant potter should have less desert styled objects or simply restyled clay variations. So the style effect is limited but the coregameplay is basicly the same.
other examples:
The armor of these 2 cultures could be different: ascendant europeene like we have now, while the rayya could have more sarazene/byzantene/mongolian styled. It’s much more immersive when different cultures also have different styles, the material and stats don’t even need to be changed.
Crops and animals, can be culture and biome specific, naturally a culture adapts to the biome they live in:
-Every culture has some basic must have crops, while the rest is optional or got a fitting replacement, but needs to be planted in the fitting biomes. Growing rice in a desert is impossible since you need lot of water, while other plants need hot climate and can’t be grown in cold regions. So rayya as a desert culture would never have rice in their basic catalog and ascendants don’t have any recipe for cactee. In that way each culture got their own preferred food and cooking recipes.
-Whether you grow corn or wheat isn’t a really big difference, especially if you throw it out for animals or make flour out of it, both can be used for unshaped recipes like bread, these crops can be handled as culture specific food, ofcourse you can add some specific recipes just for variation. So if we add rice as biome specific plant, rayya could still use it to make flour or as animal food, but simply don’t have it in their baisc catalog and can’t grow it in the desert. (unshaped recipe: bread can be crafted using corn flour, wheat flour or rice flour), as additional animal food they could implement tall grass patches, which could be cut to make hay.
-Rayya could replace sheeps with alpacas/lamas for simple wool and meat production, while ascendants could hold geese or ducks as their preferred animals for eggsand birdmeat (feathers?), bunnies can be replaced with guinea pigs. The basic mechanic is exactly the same, it just looks different.

Another idea would to implement cultural limited technology:
-wild honeycombs spawning in the wild, can be gathered for honey and royal jelly (medical ingredient for the herbalist). Since flowers and vegetations is pretty rare in the desert honey is a rare and expensive resource for the rayya, so they use it only for special recipes. But the ascendants are grown up in a mild climate, with flowers etc, so their herbalist and cook have more recipes for honey and maybe a bonus ability to build up beehives, to keep bees and gather bigger quantaties of honey.
-ascendants can regrow their main resource wood, while clay as main resource for rayya needs to be dig from the ground and is “limited” ( you just need to create huge holes for it, but the landscape suffers, right?). Do you know about the the nile flood? Every season a huge flood brings lots of mud and the egyptian had new soil to plant their crops. So imagine our rayya got a special wooden device to collect clay from a river. So their carpenter makes a huge sieve out of wood, which can be placed in a river and it generates clay every few days. A technical adaption of the rayya, i mean why should the ascendants invent such device, when their habitat provides so many other resources.

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Or perhaps something that could differientiate the cultures that could be used for trades also:
Say in a combat sense, one could have better weaponry, the other better defense.
Say Rayya has stronger weaponry. Their style of weapon crafting yields stronger or sharper weaponry which results in a higher Attack yield.
Ascendant with stronger defense. Their metal is denser and provides higher protection(or defense), inc. Shields.

Even access to different metal types found in each biome could influence this in the future.

Mhh yes ofcourse but with little extra aspects:
-low level soldiers can’t use weapons/armor of other cultures
-more experienced are able to use these’em but only with debuffs
-maxlevel soldiers can use them with out debuffs.
-using culture fitting weapon and armor gives us postive buffs, scaling with soldier level.
So a max level soldier using fitting weapons and armor have physically other stats as a max level soldier with unfitting armor, but the small buffs can rebalance this difference or might create additonal strategic variation (speed buff, level of exhaustion, wheather effects).

otherwise you’ll end up using the “best” combo the whole time, cutting out the diversity and balance. And such system would balance other items like the bone axe, too. (no instant super soldier)

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