Metal progress branching

[redram]

3 hours ago, Erik said:

I meant gameplay reasons, how it would benefit gameplay, not realism.

The same reason we have different tiers of tools or anything else - progression.  If one wants a game with just single blocks without progression, then minecraft is probably more their speed.

 

3 hours ago, Erik said:

While stone hammers did exist, they aren't very useful or safe for crushing ores

Not important.  They'd be there for the initial step.  The game is already loose with what's 'realistic' in many of the copper tools, not mention many other aspects of 'realism'.  After all:

On 11/30/2018 at 11:14 AM, Erik said:

Game design > Historical accuracy/realism

 

3 hours ago, Erik said:

and they would also go against the staged progression I outlined, making crushing ores less rewarding.

That opinion is noted - you think ore processing should be an optional reward.  I'm not sure what 'staged progression I outlined' you are referring to.  Another post?  I have a different opinion regarding 'rewarding' but the confusion aspect could be a thing, mainly for those already used to TFC though I think.  But what I was after was other peoples' opinions after all so I'm just kind of leaving it at that for now.

[tony Liberatto]

3 hours ago, Erik said:

I meant gameplay reasons, how it would benefit gameplay, not realism.

While stone hammers did exist, they aren't very useful or safe for crushing ores and they would also go against the staged progression I outlined, making crushing ores less rewarding.

First things first. Water powered devices were not all connected to one only water wheel. I do not mean they could not be, but in reality, the river is big and people used to have several different ways to power different devices all at the same time and place.
If you watch this video, you will see that each contraption has its own way of using the water. They are not all connected to only one Water wheel. 

Now for the stone hammer and progression.  Crushing ores without some kind of powered crusher should be cumbersome and time-consuming enough to make the player feel rewarded when he/she finally is able to build a powered crusher. But as a means to get his/her first tools, enough at least so he/she can build those devices. 
Until that we can have some other alternatives, the first that comes to mind is the stone hammer, the mortar and pestle is another and the quern is another.  None of that should be very efficient, but like I said, enough to get first tools.

[Erik]

5 hours ago, redram said:

The same reason we have different tiers of tools or anything else - progression.  If one wants a game with just single blocks without progression, then minecraft is probably more their speed.

We may have very different opinions on how to do meaningful, rewarding progression:

If I understand correctly, you seem to want a "wide progression", where most of the mechanics of the game are available at the start (i.e. stone age) in some way or form, with all mechanics being effectively required to progress. The later stages of the game just "upgrade" these mechanics and make them faster or more efficient.

My way of doing progression would be more akin to an inverted pyramid, starting with very few mechanics and adding new mechanics with each stage of progression, with "upgrades" being very rare and many mechanics being introduced as optional first to become required later in the progression.

Both ways of doing progression have their advantages and disadvantages and further discussion of this would probably be fit better on another thread.

5 hours ago, redram said:

I'm not sure what 'staged progression I outlined' you are referring to.  Another post?

I was just referring to my previous post about post about ore crushing being optional at first, then requiring a mechanical hammer for higher tier ores and then being required for highest tier ores. Sorry for the confusing term.

4 hours ago, tony Liberatto said:

First things first. Water powered devices were not all connected to one only water wheel. I do not mean they could not be, but in reality, the river is big and people used to have several different ways to power different devices all at the same time and place.
If you watch this video, you will see that each contraption has its own way of using the water. They are not all connected to only one Water wheel. 

This is realism, not gameplay oriented. I get that people used water powered hammers and horse powered mills, but that doesn't mean they should be in the game. We will have a mechanical power network with hopefully interesting design problems and that network should be put to use, as it would be the most mechanically interesting (balancing torque and speed) and easiest way to add a mechanical hammer to the game, with multiple options of powering it.

5 hours ago, tony Liberatto said:

Now for the stone hammer and progression.  Crushing ores without some kind of powered crusher should be cumbersome and time-consuming enough to make the player feel rewarded when he/she finally is able to build a powered crusher. But as a means to get his/her first tools, enough at least so he/she can build those devices. 
Until that we can have some other alternatives, the first that comes to mind is the stone hammer, the mortar and pestle is another and the quern is another.  None of that should be very efficient, but like I said, enough to get first tools.

The act of crushing ores should imo be rewarding, even with a hammer and not something boring or even annoying just to make using the powered crusher feel more rewarding.

[tony Liberatto]

I do not really understand what you mean by :
"The act of crushing ores should imo be rewarding ". 
The reward is the tool in itself. The player makes a mechanical contraption to perform a job because it makes it faster and more efficiently than a manual work. Just like in real life.

This thread was originally about metal progression tech, I think we deviated into mechanical power, with the ore crushing as the example for it.
So, maybe we should go back to ore processing.
Ore should need to be crushed, as a way to separate the metal from the rock. Ore should them be washed to separate dirt. I know some ores are at this point cooked or roasted, but I do not know enough about the subject. the next step in most cases is to melt the ore, but I think many ores require some kind of flux to be melted together with the ore. 

[Erik]

1 hour ago, tony Liberatto said:

I do not really understand what you mean by :
 "The act of crushing ores should imo be rewarding ". 
The reward is the tool in itself. The player makes a mechanical contraption to perform a job because it makes it faster and more efficiently than a manual work. Just like in real life.

The reward should be doubled ore output, which makes the optional effort really worth it and makes crushing ores something that players want to do and not something they are forced to do. For this to apply, ore crushing needs to be optional.

1 hour ago, tony Liberatto said:

This thread was originally about metal progression tech, I think we deviated into mechanical power, with the ore crushing as the example for it.

Well, ore crushing is a case of metal progression and the main question is, if it should be optional. Most suggestions on this thread seem to be designed to be realistic, not to provide rewarding, and easy to understand, streamlined and most notably fun gameplay. "Hardcore" does not translate into "better".

[redram]

 

1 hour ago, Erik said:

"Hardcore" does not translate into "better".

"simplistic" does not necessarily translate to better either.  If it did we'd all be playing minecraft happily.  I'm genuinely curious how you draw this line.   The game is nothing but a string of required processes.  We're probably going to have to butcher soon-ish to get animal  parts.  Is that ok?   Is having to smelt the ore ok?  Why not just let the player use the ore in the grid to make things, or ingots?  Four in the grid makes an ingot.   Why bother with tedious smelting? 

[Erik]

7 minutes ago, redram said:

"simplistic" does not necessarily translate to better either.  If it did we'd all be playing minecraft happily.  I'm genuinely curious how you draw this line. We're probably going to have to butcher soon-ish to get animal  parts.  Is that ok?   Is having to smelt the ore ok?  Why not just let the player use the ore in the grid to make things, or ingots?  Four in the grid makes an ingot.   Why bother with tedious smelting? 

There isn't a definitive line. My point is just to design interesting gameplay and not depictions of the real world. Could butchering be an interesting piece of gameplay? Hell yeah! There are many interesting things that butchering could enable gameplay wise and it will add a lot of immersion. Why smelting? Maybe to gate the player to do pottery and charcoal? Maybe because the game would be boring and pointless without smelting?

25 minutes ago, redram said:

The game is nothing but a string of required processes.

True, but we can make the player feel like it isn't required, but his decision, because it is fun and/or rewarding. And that is why we shouldn't design gameplay to be realistic and hardcore, but to be fun and rewarding (that doesn't mean hardcore and realistic can't be fun, just that it isn't always).

[tony Liberatto]

Getting tired of the discussion. It gives me the impression that you want the player to make a whole Mechanical Device with the only intention of getting more refined ore from the rough ore. but as a purely optional thing, that the player can completely ignore if he/she wants.

I disagree. Not about the crushing machine, that the player can make or not, up to them. But not escape the crushing feature.
First off, at the time the crushing ore feature is included in the game, all tools need to get more durability. Not as a reward to the player, but as a question of gameplay balance, if we make the tool making too complex and keep the original durability the player will do nothing but make tools.

The introduction of all mechanical powered machines, be it either water, wind or animal, they need to be created with the purpose of alleviating manual labor. That is why they were invented in the first place.  Every single tool and machine in the world was invented to make some job easier or possible.      

That is the way I want the game to introduce each device. 
One example, we now have to grind grain to make bread. Following your logic that should be optional and the player would get more bread if he/she uses the quern. 

The way I see, the player is required to grind grain to make bread. He/she can use a quern but is slow and once we get fatigued, the player will get tired. Is also a bit boring, especially if we want to grind a lot of grain. If we can have some kind of mechanical device that can make the job faster and that it will not makes us tired, is reward enough for me. 
For ores, it should be exactly the same thing, the player is required to crush raw ores, is slow, time-consuming and makes you tired, but you can do it, later on, you are able to make a mechanical crusher. That is a reward enough. If the argument is that a mechanical crusher will be more efficient and should give a slightly better output, I could agree, but not as the major point to make it.

[Erik]

9 hours ago, tony Liberatto said:

It gives me the impression that you want the player to make a whole Mechanical Device with the only intention of getting more refined ore from the rough ore. but as a purely optional thing, that the player can completely ignore if he/she wants.

We both want the same thing, crushing ores being a process the player does in Vintage Story, we just want to archive it in different ways. I just don't want crushing to be a useless pain the player has to go through without reason, just to make the crafting chain longer and metal tools more difficult to get. I want to make crushing ores logical, not on a realism perspective, but on a gameplay perspective: When not crushing you ores gives you less metal, then there is a gameplay incentive to crush ores. And because players would be worse of not crushing ores, when they finally have build a metal hammer, they will crush ores, because it will give them huge benefits. And because they couldn't crush ores before they had a metal hammer, they know what it means not to crush ores, how much ore they "wasted". Crushing ores therefore, while being optional, can be used as a soft requirement, with higher tier stuff requiring more metal.

The mechanical hammer would still be very relevant, as it makes the progress of crushing ores faster, more efficient and not eating your hammers durability, while also being able to be automated. This alone is inventive enough to make the mechanical hammer very viable for most players, but it can be further enhanced: Some ores may only be crush-able by the mechanical hammer, for example iron.

The mechanical hammer could even be required for processing some things, like geodes, which could make it a required part of the tech tree later on.

To clean up one last thing: Crushing wouldn't cause a higher ore output, but not crushing would cause a lower ore output. It's just a change of wording, meaning the same thing as "crushing causes higher ore output", but maybe it  helps this discussion. The ore output is of course only relative and not further discussed in any of my posts.

I fell like I repeated myself a lot in the last few posts and that probably means that this discussion isn't really going anywhere, without some outside opinions.

[Ashantin]

This is my first post on these forums. Red Ram - you asked me to join this discussion. I don’t mind some grind, otherwise I would not be willing to play VS at all. I’m having trouble finding tin. The thought of having to do more to the metal like crushing the ores is very unattractive to me. 

I find using the quern very time consuming and irritating. Just pressing the top and waiting for the flour seems a waste of life. 

In primitive societies the endless repetitive slog to stay alive had life as a reward. Playing a computer game where you have endless repetitive slog isn’t that good a use of life. 

You know that I’m not the sort of player who would normally play this type of game. However, I am the type of player who could be the difference in profit if it stays an attractive proposition for me. 

I am playing single player unmodded . 

[Stroam]

I don't mind refining raw ore and I think such a game design can be used to great effect as a hudle for various ores for the purposes of extending the progression tree.

I agree with Ashantin that time costs for processing that make the player actively hold down a button and wait are best avoided and those costs would best be extracted different ways. 

I think an issue with open world games is pacing. In story driven games the pacing can be controlled with the story. In open world games it's left up to the player to control pacing which is great as long as the game has a large variety of activities with different pacing. 

Ore processing is a great opportunity to add in a different pace. If you look at some other games you'll see many activities have stations with mini games whoes outcome determines the output in some way. Adding in a different pacing is why they are there.

[tony Liberatto]

I think the issue is a bit more complicated than that. 
The quern is the first player powered block to be added to the game. 

The intention of the developers is to add mechanical power to the game, that will make things like grinding flour a lot faster, the same as it did for human populations. 

I love the idea of more complexity in ore processing, but it will need to wait for mechanical power. 

A bit of grind while the player gather resources and is able to create some mechanical devices is good. It gives the player a reason to progress in the game.