I get that. Let's agree on 34h in a row = dead. The game needs to more or less emulate that to be considered realistic.
<snip>
If you're not feeble, you don't die from exhaustion in this game unless fainting every day for decades and without medical attention. After investigation, the game is too tolerant at best.
is maybe different from what I remember, but clearly recall having slaves die with exactly housework. if game has changed, that is good news.
Okay. How do we translate that in game? What can we add for an ideal transcription of hunger:
Your slave whining and begging? Some description of her skin turning grey? She cannot sleep? She's ready to kill you to eat food?
look below
Okay, I need evidence to back up your assessment that in a dangerous world, a slave you've acquired 5 minutes ago will not act like a spoil brat even if she has the temperament to be one. Don't forget that some slaves just got kidnapped recently into this world and might have been important people in their universe (among slaves, there are war heroes, artists...).
what means evidence? if you mean reasoning, i say that the threats of this world would not be difficult to see.
slave is kidnapped and sold at auction. will be seeing, hearing things. this world hardly hides what it is like.
war hero might think better to die than be slave, but most peoples roll over when threatened if no obvious way of escape.
I think that as of now, the game manages psychology quite well. A "cowardly" slave you acquired 5 minutes ago will cook and even give you a handjob, no questions asked, if you look authoritative and clean. If you ask them questions without explaining EXACTLY what you're saying (that the world around is worse than being your slave), then depending on her personality she might get angry, or sob. I don't know of any slavery game that is as accurate psychologically, nor am I convinced that the psychology of the game needs change, yet.
most subjects show compliance, is not special "cowardly" trait. that is fault, not fundamental model of JONT slave breaking. overestimates peoples. slaves capable of real resistance or strong psychological resilience should be quite rare, maybe 10% of slaves, maybe less. training much harder, but might have significant advantages over "easy" slaves if broken. also some people can not be broken no matter what. certain combinations of slaves traits should = impossible to break, slave will always be threat, always try to escape, always willing to die before surrendering will. unsure if "should" == "good idea in game" though. would frustrate players if some slaves just time consuming waste of money.
A Deus Ex Machina is an element of story that resolves a desperate situation for the characters. The fog is not, it's a premise. You find it as a cheap reason to explain why the society is cannibalistic, but your arguments are speculative conjectures.
I calls premises ex machinas when premise does not achieve results developer wants so developer makes things up to force it. is same exact mechanism at different point in story construction, so I use same word, plus I don't know another. that is what I think happening with JONT ... game premise support cannibalism, but game developer wanted almost all nutrition to be cannibalism. so fog added little features until it acts as "deus ex machina" to sort of justify what developer wanted.
One person can feeds ~24 people for one day if fully grown and 100% efficiency. Butchering not 100% efficient, waste spoiling bad distribution adds more inefficiency. steeper wealth distribution (inequality) creates more inefficiency, JONT society very inequal. probably not better than 70% net efficiency, but 50% more plausible.
new arrivals must equal maybe 1/10 of current population every day if human meat primary food source. such numbers threaten to overwhelm city, not just provide food.
like in USA if 33,000,000 people crossed border EVERY DAY.
not argument against cannibalism, argument against cannibalism as primary or major food source.
No, some magic substance that corrupts fetus and kill animal wouldn't necessarily kill humans. But if I said the fog killed animals, I was wrong anyway. And no, the population is not limited by removing pregnancy; it's too common even without birth. It is explained by the Smuggler's Den girl:
The church obviously has the power to enforce laws (with their paladins we can assume), so much that one of the most influential person of Eternal Rome (serpis president) doesn't dare to fuck with them so openly.
Few rulers in Europe fucked with church openly either. Church in this world obviously very different but still not more powerfull than all factions put together. Churches often act as "stabilizing influence" so most factions protect church to protect themselves. This not true if situation bad enough or if stakes high enough.
I like the idea. If you want to develop it for the game, I'll make a roadmap for you in the OP. It'd be a good post-patrician quest.
depends on conversation, but not against idea.
You know, you have weird fetishes yourself; you should be happy that some things in the game appeal to a very niche audience even if it's one you don't happen to be a part of ^^
don't confuse ideas with fetishes. this game interesting due to concept and world design. if guided by what personally I like would very different.
And it's less about it being sexy than about being a setting (weirdly common in hentai productions btw).
point I trying to make is game forced into very narrow niche if setting ONLY consideration.
not saying setting consideration bad, saying motif should be flexible.
For now there's only fiend cum you can feed your slave with (and I'd like pictures of it, I've had this plan for a while but Powerairmax, the former developer was not in favor of it. Things could change now). We can add other options in the future, I'd rather do that after all the other important things in the roadmap tho; the main dev has already gone burnt out it seems and the transition will be harsh.
okay
This scientific article states that in the prehistoric era,
cannibalism was quite common for nutritious reason:
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| "In the majority of studies, the interpretation is that cannibalism was practiced for nutritional reasons
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,
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,
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,
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(although there has never been a way to quantify how nutritional these episodes may be)."
human meat very poor nutritional source. 650 callories per lb, pig meat is 1800 calories per lb.
not feeling like citing million sources, but this topic I read on much, inviting you to do same. will give tl;dr of cannibalism in human societies through known human history
3 kinds major cannibalism practiced known to anthropological sciences.
1. survival/starvation induced. this one think Donner party. when group faces immediate starvation some groups will choose to eat members who die of other causes. rarerly will choose victim by lots and kill to sustain others. this never done except as absolutely last resort for obvious reasons.
2. funeral cannibalism. eating members of own group who die of unrelated causes, probably beguns as prolonged case 1 turned into ritual. tribes believe eating dead gives powers or knowledge of dead. way to become one with departed ancestors. also really good way to spread prion disease.
3. outgroup/conquest cannibalism. this one most common, practices by monkeys humans etc. when group A fights group B and wins, eats dead of B and maybe A too. Sometimes extended to captured members of opposing group.
besides, even your paper doesn't support your argument completely. from conclusion:
"We are, however, significantly lower in calorie value when compared to single large fauna (such as mammoth, bison, cattle and horse) that have a much greater calorific return per individual than many of the groups of cannibalised human remains. This return must therefore question the viability of hunting and consuming hominins for strictly nutritional reasons."
The premise of the lore is that Eternal Rome is a cannibalistic society where human life is less valuable than even cereal culture. It literally says in the OP of this thread: "Human life is cheap". That's the second sentence of the overview!
Yes, is premise. Wanting to see game live words plausibly. 90% of way there I think, but not there now.
I don't get if "wet tissue paper" is literal or a visual metaphor. Without hard evidence to back it up, for economy of means, we must consider that Eternal Rome's average diet is at least viable enough for the rich humans (remember, it's a magic medieval sci-fi world, we can perfectly imagine vitamin complement that are left out of the narrative). Btw, in Eternal Rome, there are undead people in the Necropolis; and they like to feed of humans almost uncontrollably so (based on the guard dialog). So if anything, you're 100% right and the diet is unsustainable; so much that it only a few survive and the other become undead.
one thing I doesn't recall is how long this game world existed. if exactly as you described, game world would have exploded quite fast. eventually undead outnumber all else combined and take over, all humans become food. either game happening very early in game world before this happens, or other factors balancing it so eternal rome actually sustainable.
if eternal rome sustainable, should determine how/why in context of established lore even if that means modying the lore as necessary. not easily, though. only with careful discussion/consideration.
As I stated, you've visibly not seen all of the game's possible outcomes. A newly acquired girl will more or less immediately be a willing slave giving the right circumstances.
I know SOME girls like that, but I think bell curve centred in wrong place. estimate 60% of slaves would be immediately compliant. Also estimate some percentage "should" be impossible to break, but repeating that may not be good idea to actually include in game. maybe handwave as slaves like that never reach open market.
For that, I think you REALLY didn't pay attention to the game's lore. It's explained everywhere that human food is the most cheap thing there is in this world. There are dozens of economic bullshit in this game (stated in the Roadmap, in the OP). Cannibalism is really not one of them (and why do you say "baby eating"?).
Because I think massive endless waves of human traffic reaching eternal rome daily would destroy it. deluge of war heroes and artists would smite and sing any army to dust eventually. with other considerations in hand most plausible source of COMMON cannibalism is easy way to dispose of slave offspring when surplus of slave offspring.
in slave driven society, slaves often outnumber citizens as much as 10 to 1. no idea what proportion would be in JONT world, but if resources scarce AND too many offspring then cannibalism begins to make sense.
but for that to happen must release idea of only church can raises babies. babies take many time, not just money, food. look at Romanian (I think) mass orphanages... one nurse attending as much as 20 babies. results were catastrophic humantarian crisis.
i thinking not to remove problems with births, but to remove cannibalism as MAIN source of food. just to make more logical. that hard sell since very deep part of game, but otherwise never will feel quite plausible to me I think. right now just seems like lore too much excuse for cannibalism instead of "letting cannibalism happen as side effect of lore".
From what I understand, the game is good, even based on your standard. You just lacked the explanations to consolidate the world into a cohesive piece. The game only gives information sparsely, like a Dark Souls game; so it's an artistic decision. If you find any lore contradiction even now, please state them, but what you stated above aren't. And more importantly, the biggest risk we're facing as modders is to ADD lore inconsistencies. It's my difficult and unrewarding job to make sure the game stays true to its legacy (hence why I may appear dismissive of new ideas).
Yes, is huge risk. Every change needs to be treated adversarially.
Maybe, but I'm not convinced by your demonstration, because you're giving arguments that are based on false premise because you lacked information that the game itself gives.
I think you are mistaken about that. is hard to explain all information I have.
About raising babies, the Vatican is not "1 mere organization", it's like the leader of the crossroad of the whole multiverse. I trust them to have enough magical powers or financial resources to have a foster care branch.
like mentioned above, humans require enormous amounts of individual care for many, many years. for church sustaining even just nobility population needs nearly as much staff as entire nobility population just to sustain it. and brings to point you NOT acknowledge!
underestimating human needs for children. society of JONT not post modern self hating adult children. everyone from two bit merchants to serpis president himself wants posterity. and they does NOT wants to have another group (church) controlling their children, the future of their house!
church more powerful than any single house, but against every single person combined is not remotely plausible. if church THAT powerful, would be no houses at all. all things would belong to church. only way for church AND houses to exist is if equilibrium exists where church has to not destroy any single house or risk other houses turning against it, and each house has to leave church alone or church destroys it AND houses not dare attack each other too much or church stop them.
that works if situation tolerable to majority of people. houses might hate each other or hate church, but things not that bad. can do daily business, can work for future of house. church can work for future of church.
if houses has no future == nothing to lose. all houses forms rogue alliance to take secrets from church, maybe destroy it.
but once secret "out", can buy it. more houses with knowledge means more people gains it over time. eventually can buy from back alley dealer. Maybe against law to have children, maybe church pretends to enforce law and people pretends to follow it, like prohibition.
that most plausible. and when children too many or risk being caught, children go to slaughter. everyone wins. except slaves and inconvient kids.
That'd be cool. The only definitive critic is creation
You're basically free to do whatever you want with the game. Then
you can release it on your own, as a mod.
There's another possibility with three requirements:
No bugs, doesn't conflicts with the lore nor betrays the legacy, is an improvement and not an downgrade. If you manage to meet the requirements, we'll put our efforts in common to add your new features to the next official version.
yes.