An idea to have a more alive world

I’m more interested in the customizing thier looks,feats and stats. All stats effect them. They have a carry weight. I want to see them using emotes.

Did he bring his staff with him? I’m worried in his absence it ran out of power and his realm decayed

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What you just did is restate the same thing in different words. It’s like saying “I didn’t kick you in the balls, I simply moved in a way that intersected the trajectory of my toes with the location of your testicles” :stuck_out_tongue:

It could, but it won’t. Like I keep saying, it’s not Funcom’s vision for this game. You don’t have to trust me – just watch their recordings of their live streams and read their own forum posts. And, there’s that Reddit AMA that Dennis did once, that’s also useful reading material.

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@CodeMage
He wouldn’t mind for this kick, apparently he has BallsofSteel :rofl::rofl::rofl:.

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She.

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Problem is that even after 5 years the AI is still very janky, and is only working in combat 70% of the time. They need to take babysteps with AI, one at the time, like making worker thralls be able to stand up from their bench and walk around, then maybe assign a patrol route like in age of empire where via the radial menu on a thrall you can place out two flags where x thrall will patrol BACK and forth, and maybe you can eventually tell him to walk or run, between these points, then later down the road maybe you can use this marking system to apply it to a iron formation or a tree and then the thrall will mine that area until he has mined x amount of resources then return home

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So you want Conan exiles followers to act like Ark Dino.
Now I get it.
About this, no I am good, I like this AI as it is. I play this way years now, it never bothered me.
Just to know, in this particular game you have the option to have all the materials you need and more without using tools, I could easily do in both maps a challenge to fix every single thing a player needs without using tools at all, it is a bit rng based but it is possible, so possible that I would beg @Barnes to do a video series about it and if he’ll do it on Playstation I volunteer to help starting from scratch.

About the “he”, I beg you to accept my apologies my lady, thank you very much :pensive:.

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Considering how fish traps were changed from free resource gathering into something that needed fuel, it seems to me there is a design philosophy behind the change that we shouldn’t be able to have stuff passively gathered for us.

And I dont think having NPCs who are basically slot machines where you insert food and get back stone or wood or whatever would be interesting either. Self-sustaining that could not be, for the aforementioned speculated design philosophy.

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Let’s face it: people will figure out which way is more efficient and they’ll use that one exclusively. Either it’s more efficient to farm for food to give your farmer thralls, or it’s more efficient to farm yourself. There’s no way to balance this properly to make it a meaningful choice.

Look at fish traps: as far as I can tell, people are only relying on them for buff fish now. Sure, you can still get ichor and oil from fish, but it’s much less of a hassle to gather ichor from critters and craft oil with a T3+ alchemist.

It sounds counterintuitive at first. I mean, what’s easier than letting a bunch of compost heaps produce grubs, using those grubs to bait your fish traps, harvesting the fish from the traps, and then cooking or pressing them? No work involved beyond moving some stuff from one crafting station to another, right?

But you have to remember to get the fish before it rots (even though decay time is supposed to be slower now), and the yield is not exactly spectacular, and the crafting stations we’re talking about have to be on a suitable body of water (can’t place fish traps in a large well anymore).

Contrast that with what you can get with a good pick. You can get an abundance of ichor by paying a little visit to the spiders near the Sinkhole. As for bark, just using a pickaxe to farm wood for shaped wood will get you tons, but if you don’t want to spend time on that and just need some bark quickly, find a spot with several dead trees (e.g. the one outside the Unnamed City on the Shattered Springs side) and use your pick on them. With an T2+ alchemist’s bench and a T3+ alchemist in it, you’ll get 5 oil for 1 ichor and 1 bark. Soon you’ll have enough oil to get invaded by a large powerful country :stuck_out_tongue:

Sorry for the long rant, but the point of it was to illustrate that “would you rather cook or clean” doesn’t really work well with gameplay mechanics like this. It applies more to how people divide work among themselves, not so much to how solo people choose between different gameplay mechanics.

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Uh, no. If that were the case you would never see people using fish farms for oil production. Yet, it’s incredibly common - and by far the least efficient method. Just saying.

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I was wondering if we were going to go down that particular rabbit hole, but I decided against tackling it in a post that was already starting to feel long. I guess I was wrong :smiley:

For full disclosure: I don’t play on PVP servers, so if the situation is different there, someone will have to chime in.

That being said, yeah, there’s still plenty of fish farms for oil production. And every single one I’ve seen belongs to old, established players who already have plenty of oil. Likewise, every time a new player – or a player returning from a long hiatus – asks about the best way to get oil, they always get told “craft it with a T3+ alchemist”. I’ve yet to see one of those bothering to set up a fish farm. :man_shrugging:

TL;DR: When there are no wipes, people who have plenty of something will tend to keep their old means of producing that something.

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Yup, that’s right.

There are more than a few new builds less than a month old with fields of fish-traps for example. One guy was able to capture and break 50 or 60 named thralls in that time so I assume he knows what he’s doing. People act on whatever grabs their fancy… occasionally that is efficiency but I’m not sure that is even the most common criteria.

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The way you recruit these AI is taking them off the cross. You custom thier looks and religion then.

Baby steps would be needed. That why there 50 max in offline mode. To give the devs a controlled testing ground.

These aren’t thralls they are player version AI.

Having 50 AI that use emotes,sit and talk would be so fun.

Or just a very stupid player?

I mean, I know people who have “persuaded” their little brother or sister to grind for them in online games, either using the same account or (especially free-to-play MMOs) creating a new account. Basically their own little sweatshop workers. I think this is what BallsofSteel is trying to emulate here.

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I think settlement system like wanted by funcom at star, inspired by sims and elder scrolls système would be very amazing to have city with life.

But I don’t know how hard is to do that, but I hope funcom will achieve its ambition about that.

As an Age of Empires player, I really enjoyed the fantasy of City Life or Settlement that was promised in the early stages of CE’s development.

In AOE, you deploy Town Centers that crap out settlers when you want. Basically, you click the TC, then right-click a resource, and all the little people that are born become miners, or farmers or hunters or lumberpeeps. Then, when under attack, you can call them back into the TC and they all get out their arrows and basically launch on anyone nearby.

I would absolutely love something like this. BUT it shouldn’t acquire in-game resources, as many have said including @stelagel, it’s just too easy to loot, let alone farm. Your people should ostensibly go out and mine, chop trees, get fish or meat – but what is acquired is something different. Perhaps “building credits” of some sort, that allow you to create Tier 4 Wonders or Castles or Keeps.

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Or, we already know game AI is horrendous and can only compensate in reducing the error rate for actions.

A game AI will never decide to switch to a truncheon to try to knock out a 3skull, but I’ve seen players do just that and then spend 30 minutes justifying why it was the right idea.

Improving game AI to the point of player level interaction is currently a pipedream as software based AI that will fit in a game is extremely limited.

I don’t think it is a bad idea, it just is not, currently, plausible due to existing technological constraints so discussing how it would be implemented in Conan is moot.

Here is an article on AI in games to include NPC AI.

Changes may be on the horizon.

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