[MUD-Dev] Re: Methods to Reduce Ecological Wipeout

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 12 Aug 1998 13:17:09 -0500 
Koster, Raph<rkoster at origin.ea.com> wrote:

>> From: Michael.Willey at abnamro.com

>> If you make a distinction between herbivores and carnivores, then
>> you divide your critters into two groups: one group that isn't
>> competing with the players for resources, and one group that is,
>> but makes for much tougher competition.  Players and other
>> carnivores will consider herbivores as appropriate food sources,
>> but at least they won't be killing them off *and* consuming their
>> food sources at the same time.

> It boiled down to supplying enough for all the newbies who just
> want to kill, plus the craftspeople making a living off of
> them. Plus the adventurers demanding that the resources taken up
> by deer be spent on orcs instead...

The problem is resource depletion due to population congestion.
There are no deer because all the deer get killed for their resource
value.  The deer can't breed fast enough (not enough existent
population to procreate) and the supply of deer-killers in the form
of players is effectively infinite and not controlled by or subject
to the deer population.  Its this specific last point that seems
most vulnerable to attack __without__ critically impacting gameplay.

  IIRC UOL doesn't implement starvation and other such mundane and
generally aggravating (food/sleep/toilet/lice/jock_itch) "features"
using the excuse that a character will maintain their basic living
state without express player attention (breathe in, breathe out,
chew, swallow, spit).

How about if those icky features remained implicit until the
character entered a realm where the base supplies were not
available?  For example, the character is in a town which has ample
food, and so the character is automatically "fed".  The character
moves out into the wilderness and remains automatically fed as their
wilderness skills when mapped against the prey/food-quotient of
their location comes out as "you are fed".  The character then moves
to the middle of the desert.  Finally their wilderness skills are
insufficient to feed them without express attention and they start
getting "hungry", "starving", or "faint" warnings.  With no explicit
action, upon return to a food-plenty environment the hunger would
progressively be handled automagically under the covers.  However if
they remained in the desert they would have to explicitly do
something about food or starve.

Now, mapping this back to cities and other population centers:

  Population centers consume resources.  In the early days the
resource consumption can be considered automatic in that food (to
pick one particular resource), is in sufficient supply to enter the
city thru presumed osmosis.  However, as the city grows, its
resource consumption also grows, eveually outstripping the local
wildlife's ability to sustain (this is a function of the
never-realised sim-peep population).  Ergo. the nascent food
availability begins to drop below equilibrium and then to accelerate
towards zero.

  Enter the farmers and the long range hunters, for without them the
city will starve to death.  Also enter a realistic and functionally
mandated purpose and reason for caravans, shipping combines, and
other transport operatives -- *especially* for larger population
centers.  Further farming and hunting can be both a profitable
business and an opportunity for wheeling and dealing (price fixing
anyone?), for there is considerable investment in the city placed at
risk by starvation.  That is unless instead the city decides to
move, perhaps even becoming nomadic and using the latency curve in
the food supply to sustain them between relocations...(something of
course that has extensive RL parallels).

Insert one mechanic: get many player-interesting and characterful
outputs.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...