Background and Introduction

I've been read a lot of ... interesting (sarcasm, they are fucking awful) ideas about vault balancing and pearl costs and we've been discussed a lot of it in the jaded oldfriend channel in the Civclassics mumble. Yes, people actually use the civclassics mumble and I encourage you all to do so as well. Feel free to hop in and chat sometime, we're making Mumble great again :) . I originally heard the idea talking with tabbynya and since she doesn't have a reddit account I figured I'd promote a version of this idea since I thought it was really good and has a lot of positive side effects. It was most recently mentioned by bgbba in this comment and I thought I'd throw it out there again given that pearl cost balance is coming soon TM.

My issue with the other proposals made is that they are either super convoluted to the point that it would be basically impossible to explain to newfriends or that they would require so much reworking of already existing mechanics that and of themselves are not broken. Stuff like putting a distance on pearls being near each other forcing people to make a bunch of spikes 100m apart from each other, or not allowing chests with obsidian around them to hold multiple pearls or whatever, these are just too invasive and complicated. I think it is much easier to implement something that has already been tested on another server.

Back in 1.0 when pearl costs were implemented the idea was merely to make sure that you had to actually check on the vault and refill the chest instead of merely permaing people and forgetting about them. This was a real issue, and this was even back before ring vaults were a serious consideration. Nowadays I suppose you could theoretically just load the chest full of coal, and place a hopper with another chest above it filled with more coal and basically not have to check on it for quite some time. If you don't need to check on the pearl, then the pearl cost has lost its original purpose.

The idea is player essence. Now I know what you people who played 3.0 are thinking right now: "essence was shit". Yeah with regards to XP, I agree but I think it poses some serious benefits when we look at how pearl costs work. Essence didn't work on 3.0 because that was a server that made everything super grindy in order to "balance" the game. Making certain things harder to get is definitely important but we don't have the issue of everything being really hard to get on this server, in fact we have the exact opposite problem in my opinion. Coal in particular is very easy to get and on its own it is insignificant as a pearl cost. Changing that fact right now, in the middle of the iteration, would be pointless and actually counterproductive. The difference with essence is that it isn't even something you have to grind for, you just need to log on for 30 minutes and wait. There's no grind, everyone gets it, it is very simple.

Benefits to Player Essence as a Cost Component

There are a bunch of benefits to this idea for the server and its community, and there might be more but here's some major ones I thought of:

• Raises pearl costs. Clearly this is one of the big issues with vaults as I have already mentioned. If you don't have a high enough pearl cost then keeping someone pearled doesn't matter and you can basically do the e-lego equivalent of locking them up and throwing away the key.

• Encourages activity. The way that essence worked on 3.0 was that you had to play the game to receive the essence which was 10 lored eye of ender per day. If you make everyone who wants to keep someone pearled log in for 30 minutes each day to receive the essence to keep the players pearled, that keeps the player count up a bit more and doesn't just mean people stay logged off in their vault waiting for an attack to happen.

• Empowers non-power players. This is something that needs to be focused on by the admin teams of these servers. If you want a successful server you need to balance for playstyle and not just the basic questions like "is the mining/xp/pvp fun". Essence gives a little bit more clout to non-pvpers since they can choose to embargo groups they disagree with and set up alliances with deals to pool essence in return for defense. If you want defense as a smaller nation on these servers, you can choose to team up with a larger pvp oriented group and if you don't get defense in return you can cut them off from being supplied. If enough smaller countries in an alliance react in a similar way to another smaller country being exploited like this, that can create problems for the larger pvp-oriented country. Basically don't screw over non pvp-oriented groups because they might actually turn on you with this proposal.

• Encourages larger groups. If you need essence and you're a big pvp group, you might want to consider opening yourself up a bit more to non-pvpers to grow your own group if you want a completely independent supply of essence. This is the type of cooperation between various playstyles that I'd like to see in a game and adds a major downside to being a one man nation with no vault or pvp

• Encourages trade. Currently you don't really need to trade for much on the server. Slimeballs and gunpowder were a thing while mob spawns were trash but now that isn't a problem. With essence, you're rewarded for activity and you can trade that reward if you don't have any use for a vault or pearling people. While I think it would probably make more sense for players to set up a defensive pact for player essence, this is definitely a thing that would happen and the server needs something to trade for more than just XP and bastions/bastion materials.

• Discourages perma-pearling everyone. Any server where you can perma basically everyone is awful. While some people might need to be perma-pearled, I think that the cost of doing so should come with a downside. Ideally, if you want to pearl the entire population of an equally sized or larger group you should have to really weigh the cost and benefit of each pearl you hold.

If anyone has any other beneficial aspects to this idea, leave it as a comment or if you think I'm completely insane go right ahead and say that as well. I'd like to get a discussion going on this proposal.

Implementation

Now on to the actual implementation of this proposal because there can be right ways and wrong ways of doing this. Here's some considerations I have for how this would be implemented:

• Make a factory that combines coal with essence to make the fuel. I think coal should still be a component, as arbitrary as it is, it has been a part of pearling for a while and people have significant stockpiles already. The only other use I could see coal having would be for charcoal, which I guess is fine but personally I would just make a factory to combine the things together. It isn't the most important part of this I guess, and I wouldn't be annoyed if it was just essence either.

• Give everyone a week before it actually becomes implemented as a cost component. Let people stockpile some for the pearls that they already have or to make a factory, then after that week make the pearls cost essence.

• Do NOT allow alts for this. Again I repeat, do NOT allow alts to get essence. This completely defeats all of the upsides that I just listed and makes the entire thing pointless. Tie it to IPs instead of account names, I'm sure it can be done, the admins and volunteer devs are smart people.

• Now this could be completely messed up in the balancing of this, giving each person 10 essence per day and making the cost be like 1 essence per pearl... that would completely defeat the purpose of the entire suggestion so /u/biggestnerd, /u/dsclouse117, and /u/ribagi if you consider this idea, be careful with how you implement it. I kinda think the cost should at least be equivalent to one active person per one pearled person, maybe even 2 or 3 to 1. The cost of permapearling needs to be balanced with higher levels of activity on the server for growth.

• If an ExilePearl rework is in the cards for Civclassics, I would make this cost 1 to 1 for exile and 2 to 1 for PrisonPearl but that's just me. There has to be some downside to making someone into an end prisoner surely and I think if it is tied to an essence cost that's cool. Perhaps even letting exiled players receive essence is fine but I'm not sure about that. Again, downsides and upsides to choices, balancing, yay.

Conclusion

This still doesn't solve immediate issues of vaults and bastions and only deals with the costs associated with pearling players. I think that there should be costs and benefits to different choices you make in the game and that admins should encourage certain behaviors in their community. I think encouraging larger groups, alliances, diplomacy, and trade are overall beneficial and reflect the "spirit of Civcraft". We can't just keep tailoring the server to one specific playstyle with no downsides for that playstyle, and while this doesn't fix vaults or cancerous pvp culture this does add elements of cost/benefit for players to consider. We need to balance with playstyle and interaction in mind, not just a handful of groups that ultimately make the server less interesting, instead we need to encourage more of the people that actually make the server interesting and cooperation between the two. If you can somehow balance the game and disincentivize toxic behavior I think that's a good thing.