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Mullog
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Post by Mullog » Tue May 18, 2004 7:45 pm

Lowebb wrote:Can you add the fertility I lost because of starvation back on again, since it wasnt my fault?
Sorry. You were not the only victim for this bug, so its not completely unfair! I would have to clean up for all species, and that would take more time than I can spare nowadays.
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Post by Dameon » Tue May 18, 2004 8:01 pm

Hamster wrote:
Having a bigger BS than others doesn't help you to avoid being eaten - only the attackers won't get any saturation from you.
Is this true? I thought I remember trying to hunt Val's BS 3 species last time around when I was BS 2, but I couldn't catch any. I could be mistaken here, though.
Hamster wrote:
Another idea that tickles me some time (preciselly after being eaten 6 times) is to have a non-violent version of this game also. No attacks - just individual survival and fight for territory and plants. Not all potential players are agresive ones. It's wise to think in the future on the new (mobile) players and the growth of female players population who doesn't like violence.

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Wow, that'd be boring. At least, in my book. To me this is a competition, and I may actually try to go carnivore this time around (sometime after turn 1008) and see if it's a viable game option. I still don't think it is, as you catch a lot fewer animals and there's not a completely renewable source, but it may be worth trying. My guess, though, is omnivore is the idea state- that way, at least when the pickings are slim you have something to fall back on. Unless you are going to give carnivores access to skills that will help them hunt other species easier in addition to gaining more saturation, then they literally have no advantages over ominvores, who can at least eat the much easier to catch and more-prolific plants. Anyway, having a "non-violent" game could be a feasible option, as long as you offer the regular version too. I think most players would welcome the challenge, but it'd be interesting to see what the response to a pacifistic game would be.

Also, in terms of strategy, I am sorry to say it but a lot of players are lacking foresight. You should NEVER eat an entire square worth of plants. What I have done is eat some, use my spying to check out surrounding squares, and them move on to other squares and eat plants there, If you limit the amount you eat from each square, then soon enough all the squares will reach 5000 and you'll have great options to feed from. Eating all the plants in your square is just extremely poor long-range planning. And don't go on about how it's hard to find the right plants, as BS1 almost half the map is covered in edible plants. As for BS2, well, I don't plan on getting it until I can find at least a few squares with the right colored plants.
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Post by korexus » Tue May 18, 2004 9:40 pm

You're right, Nick. It is better to let plants grow and thus have a sustainable food source in the future, but that is not always possible. I tried not hunting for the first two cycles. Only to find that Xarfei and Beastmaster between them had eaten all the food in my area. As it turns out, I would have come off better from eating the food myself. However I could not have known that from the start. The only solutions are to convince everyone not to eat out squares (unlikely) eat out squares yourself (not good long term) or try to go Omnivore and eat the SoBs. Of course, even this last option requires some luck, but in the current set up it looks like the best option...


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Post by Underdog » Tue May 18, 2004 10:51 pm

Korexus I am 100% in agreement with you.

Hanibal just happened by and at least sent me messages before he ate all my food. Now I have found a couple BS2 plant squares with food in them but I cannot find any BS1 food anymore because these ding-bats don't understand how the plant growth works. And I can't seem to get BS2 for a mutation. By the time I get to BS2 I will most likely not have more than 10 specimens and that is only if I get it this time. Quite frustrating especially since I lost out on 52 skill points that I should have had earlier and I might not be in this situation.

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Post by Allister Fiend » Wed May 19, 2004 12:47 am

Maybe a dumb question but I'll ask anyways....

Why would I find a square with body size 4 plants but only with 1 plant in it?

Seems that one won't grow that quickly if at all.

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Post by Underdog » Wed May 19, 2004 3:03 am

Ask Hanibal, He probably hunted them all down just so nobody would be able to eat them later.
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Post by Dameon » Wed May 19, 2004 6:03 am

I've been lucky so far in that I am not surrounded by idiots, apparentely. The only other player I have run into is Validon and he apparentely has enough brains to realize this simple strategy. I just don't get it- if you restrain yourself you will have a lot more plants in the future. I am doing just fine using, and my original square still has over 1000 plants, and growing. It's so hard to get the BS2 mutation and then become omnivore that it appears that if you run into players with no long-term vision, you're just screwed and there's nothing you can do about it. Very, very frustrating.

And why DID Allister find a single BS 4 plant? Are species allowed to actually eat plants they can't get saturation from? I shudder if that is the case- somebody needs to take some steps to make this game more idiot-proof. I just did some calculations, and based on that the average plants/square is just about 1000. 1000! That's a joke, considering with a little planning the average should be well over 3000 by now. While there may be enough plants in this game if all the players were good and had a grasp on strategy, you have to take into consideration all the folks with no long-term planning abilities that frankly ruin the entire chance of there actually being some strategy in the game. Bah.
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Post by korexus » Wed May 19, 2004 7:38 am

Yes, Nick. I would say you were luky. Care to tell me where you are? I might come over and nab a few of those plants myself! :wink:

The problem (as I see it) causing people to eat all the plants from the start, is that they think everyone else will do the same. Thus the best option is to get as much saturation early and avoid starving for longer. To borrow a phrase from my first year end of year report. Strategy-wise, groups of people starting close together end up working to the lowest common denominator of the group...
Again, fewer people per map and thus more space between everyone may help to reduce this effect. I certainly hope it does!


As for the black plant issue. It's safe to say that that's because someone's eaten them. I didn't think that people were meant to be able to do that, but I see that players can now attack (although not eat) creatures which are bigger than them. Maybe that's the cause of the bug, or maybe it's a "feature"...
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Post by gm_al » Wed May 19, 2004 8:21 am

Welcome to the wonderful world of species - where long-term planners meet fast eaters !

No game is what you call "idiot proof". Some players will just have fun out of making life for all others hard and only a handful will have any long-term plans. That will be even more visible with the mobile players. Some have been lucky that no one was coming around eating their food sources - others havent and need to move more to find new ones. Nicks post on spying all directions was a good hint: use a few turns to spy around makes it easier to decide where to go. In this regard I will suggest we add that spying a neighbor also reveals the number of plants from a square, not just the color.

Some more points:

1. birth and death % has been reversed so that the bigger BS now lose less. Manual update for devs should be out soon (read: after Chris exams at the latest, Ill try to work on that) The cut early on is still a bit hard to overcome, I would suggest raising initial fertility to something like 20% - 25% - more specimens will also mean more food for the carnivores later :D
2. the preferred terrain boni should work. Otherwise point out a tunr# and log we can check please
3. eating bigger BS.... now let me tell you that in my original concept there was a clear rule stating that you couldnt ATTACK or EAT any bigger BS. Through discussion we concluded that we should allow attacking bigger BS to give players the opportunity to kill potential food sources and also to have a way to defend themselves when being attacked by a bigger BS. We may reconsider this, maybe change it so that you cannot attack bigger BS PLANTS anymore, but allow fighting bigger BS players. Im still not convinced if we should go into this direction - it also makes rules even more specific, and a game lives mostly by having easy rules to follow, not dozens of exceptions to watch for. One more point on this: BS is a heavy factor in the battle equation, so it does make sense to aim for a bigger BS if you can sustain feeding.
4. there should never be a choice of mutations you get. As it stands the chance is 25% - 100% that you get what you want if you plan the SPs, and frankly I havent seen anything better then that.

Thx for not using my other threads btw.... :P

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Post by Dameon » Wed May 19, 2004 2:57 pm

gm_al wrote:Welcome to the wonderful world of species - where long-term planners meet fast eaters !

No game is what you call "idiot proof". Some players will just have fun out of making life for all others hard and only a handful will have any long-term plans. That will be even more visible with the mobile players. Some have been lucky that no one was coming around eating their food sources - others havent and need to move more to find new ones. Nicks post on spying all directions was a good hint: use a few turns to spy around makes it easier to decide where to go. In this regard I will suggest we add that spying a neighbor also reveals the number of plants from a square, not just the color.
Rest assured I have no intention of playing the mobile version, ever, because I know the number of idiots out there. I thought here online in the Kaomaris community I'd find more intelligent players, but clearly that's not always the case. Spying helps, somewhat, but yeah there definetely needs to be the number of plants in addition to the color as well. I've spied out a couple squares worth of the right color plants only to find them totally depleted due to having been inhabited by stupid players at one point or another in time.

As for the rest, my fertility has been at about 20% this game and I find that works well, provided I can find plant squares the idiots haven't demolished. I am in favor of allowing lower BS species to kill higher ones to defend food sources and the like, but I am not in favor of letting them attack higher BS plants, because that makes the game more suceptible to idiots who didn't read the manual. Also, in re to mutations, I think we are OK now, although it can be somewhat frustrating. My only recourse against idiots is to get omnivore so I can eat them, but I am 0-for-3 on BS 2 attempts so far. I may have to try up to 3 more times to get it, depending on my luck, and that is somewhat irritating that all I can do at this point is run away from idiots and try to find food sources they haven't demolished while desparately trying to grow up. Unfortunately they may follow me around, find the same 5000 plant square I have, and then eat them all as their tiny brains continue to fail to process. Sigh.
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Post by Donut » Wed May 19, 2004 3:27 pm

Dameon wrote:only to find them totally depleted due to having been inhabited by stupid players at one point or another in time.
Stupid players or smart players?

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Post by Lowebb » Wed May 19, 2004 3:27 pm

I'm beginning to think there is a sublimable message in that somewhere Dameon

Dameon: "I have a idots 5000 idots plant all square of in you the are species idiots game :lol:

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Post by gm_al » Wed May 19, 2004 4:03 pm

** Changes **

Thats what they call holidays.... another day working on species for me. :cry:

Already live:
* the non-sense that a BS1 player can kill the same amount of BS1 plants as he can kill BS4 plants was stopped. This was made possible because all plants had a PDEF of 0-10. Plants now have a PDEFmax of 7 + (BS x 3), so a BS1 plant rolls 0-10, BS2 rolls 0-13, BS3 rolls 0-16 and BS4 rolls 0-19. This allows us to keep the VIABLE tactic for Players to attack bigger BS plant sources, but they will fail way more often now. More turns wasted for them.
* the minimum growth of plants in a square is set to zero. No more wasted default "Hunt plants" orders that just kill 1-2 plants. This change has also to be seen in the light of the coming "Incompatible foods" change (read below)
* new games will not start with a cycle Turn#0

Coming soon:
* new graphics !
* spying neighbor square will reveal the number of plants there
* Incompatible food changes: the current system was too complicated and varied too much, so we struck it to some simple rule:
"Yellow species cannot attack/eat other yellow things"
Thats it. No more additional incompatibilities when BS increases. You cannot attack any green plant or player if you are green yourself - simple. The original 50% reduction of saturation effects from eating plants of same color was cut - no more attacking your own color plants.
Please note that "Indifference" will allow you to attack plants and players of same color again.

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Post by TBert » Wed May 19, 2004 4:19 pm

I think only a few people (the ones that gobbled down their starting square and became a swarm of locusts, eating everything in their path) started the chain reaction that caused my strategy to amount to "move constantly, eating whatever you can find", but now it's my only choice. I'm down to 15 specimens, no saturation. Unless plants start growing back fast, now that species are starting to starve, I'm gonna die a horrible painful death.

It is crazy that the BS1 were allowed to eat BS2, but luckily that seems fixed now. Only other thing I can say is, less people. This seems like I've just gotta run around and get lucky to stay alive, not use any strategy.
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Post by korexus » Wed May 19, 2004 4:36 pm

TBert wrote:I think only a few people (the ones that gobbled down their starting square and became a swarm of locusts, eating everything in their path) started the chain reaction that caused my strategy to amount to "move constantly, eating whatever you can find", but now it's my only choice. I'm down to 15 specimens, no saturation. Unless plants start growing back fast, now that species are starting to starve, I'm gonna die a horrible painful death.
It's true that players doing that near you is very very annoying. But setting a higher minimum growth wouldn't help. In order for the growth to make a viable difference it would have to be of the order 500 - effectively resetting any depleted square every cycle. Less than this would just result in people still starving, desperately eating the new grown food and continuing the dull and painful cycle.

If, however, we did set such a high regrowth. All of the challange would go out of the game. There would be no need to be careful about how much you ate. It'd all grow back anyway. Hunger would never be an issue for anyone as the plants would be so abundant. Sounds like an ideal ecosystem for our critters, but hardly an ideal setting for the game...
It is crazy that the BS1 were allowed to eat BS2, but luckily that seems fixed now. Only other thing I can say is, less people. This seems like I've just gotta run around and get lucky to stay alive, not use any strategy.
Not fixed, just reduced. If people really want to eat bigger plants to sabotage other people's chances they can. They'll just have to very dedicated to that aim and have plenty of stocked food while they go about it...

In the end, there's always going to be a few 'idiots' in the game. Most of the people in this case though, probably either didn't realise that the strategy would go badly or were forced to follow it by other people around them. Some people seem to have managed to hang on and grab some mutations. - We even have one Omnivore. Hopefully the locusts amoung us will stall soon and realise why that strategy doesn't pay off. Then maybe they won't try the same strategy again...



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Post by ThinKing » Wed May 19, 2004 5:49 pm

Donut wrote:Stupid players or smart players?
Indeed. I imagine that there are some players who now have a good saturaion level, while everyone else struggles to avoid starving. Sounds to me like they made the right choice!!

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Post by Dameon » Wed May 19, 2004 7:54 pm

Gone wrote:
Donut wrote:Stupid players or smart players?
Indeed. I imagine that there are some players who now have a good saturaion level, while everyone else struggles to avoid starving. Sounds to me like they made the right choice!!
Fine, let me rephrase. The players who did this are the ones who believe in relying on LUCK to find another compatible square. If they are LUCKY enough to find an untouched square, then they are probably doing great, yes. However, if instead they trusted to strategy instead of luck, everybody would be better off, not just the LUCKY players (and I am this time around, no question). I just like games where strategy counts for more than luck, that's all.
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Post by Hamster » Wed May 19, 2004 10:21 pm

The game stalled again. This time on turn $483 and its so for for 87 minutes now.

Seems the cron job for turns isn't triggered...
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Post by korexus » Wed May 19, 2004 10:33 pm

The Cron Job is working fine. Unfortunately, the turn keeps stalling when trying to run Dark Monk's orders.

This has the result of nothing after him in the OOP happening. - Including updating the turn number.

Fortunately, only Allister is before DM in the OOP, so resetting the game shouldn't be too hard. I have a fair idea what broke the game. (I did it myself earlier, but I fixed it before anyone noticed! :wink:) However, fixing it would cause the game to carry on running with AF having a lot more turns run than anyone else, giving him a clear advantage.

Therefore, the game is going to have to go on hold until Rune wakes up and fixes it. (As he's the only person, as far as I am aware, who can change players' information.) He can take everything Allister's gained over night back off from him, then fix the plant hunting bug which is causing us so much trouble. Until then, I'm afraid you're just going to have to be patient. And If AF can do as little as possible, that would make resetting him easier later on...

Thanks,


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[edit]
I've frozen the game for Allister too. Now all we have to do is wait for Norway to wake up and make everything ok again... [/edit]
Last edited by korexus on Wed May 19, 2004 10:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Allister Fiend » Wed May 19, 2004 10:47 pm

oh
Last edited by Allister Fiend on Wed May 19, 2004 10:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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