So at one time devs envisioned their game and how they imagine it how the see the tribes of Mann and the core part of it was that they dont wish for the game to assume some balance but more or less give the feel of the unfair real world, where bigger people smash small people and rich people exploit poor people.
And I personally love that, I love the fact that the game will be centered around politics on the top and grueling labour for those who want a multiplayer farming simulator. I especially love the fact that when fresh nonpledged players enter the game we might even see a "class struggle" dynamic with pledges with everything to loose and their gain dependent on their ability to pool players for their project and on other side the new players with nothing to loose and everything to gain. I believe that this creates a fun premise and will provide some of more exciting gameplay for everyone.
However at some point another writeup was created whch is called tribe selection guide it is found on the bottom of the page on the wiki, that is lets be honest a writeup without the complexity that the lore got which basically tells players "play x tribe if you wanna do y, dont pick x tribe if you wanna do z". Quite literaly by this exact formula at the end of a token tribe description and almost no additional info was given to the players since.
I think that is in my opinion just bad game design or/and bad communication of intent, and it is turning people away, at least to me it is an issue because of the implications of tribes designed that way, it is decreasing my trust in SBS to deliver a fun gameplay experience and thus postopning my decision to pledge some $$$ to the project.
So the issue I have with this is
it is kinda half-assed writeup that provides serious info which serves to weigh on the tribe differences alot.
it is unbalanced, and that would not even be an issue if the biomes would be equally distributed across kingdoms and have comparable tribe %. but what we have is lets say a kingdom where 2/3 of pop are dras and to'resk which are unfit of competitive pvp actions like skrimishing etc. according to that writeup.
it implies all playstyles bear equal weight on game design which is not true. Alot of play styles are driven by players without regard for gameplay mechanics, like rp, politics, diplomacy, counseling, are playstyles driven by human interaction and are not even a tiny bit determined by what in-game tribe a player will choose and focusing tribes around them when the only variable is really players own capacity for those actions is kinda silly.
If i am good at diplo, I am good at diplo i dont need to be to'resk to have effective diplomatic comms with other groups. and presenting it as to-resk are good at diplo "game of houses" but not at combat is just bad. the player is good at it and that will not change wether he is playing brudvir or to'resk except that in first case he will have also be able to do "heavy skhirmishing".
I dont need to have a high int dras that apparently makes good counselors, when counseling means telling someone over discord what they should do. Playing dras will not make me smarter to fullfill that role. however it will limit what my effectiveness in combat is based on the biome I am in.
And on the other hand when engaging in another kind of player interaction (pvp) that pick will determine ones "stats". I will not be more stupid or click faster if I play a brudvir warrior or a dras counselor.
- it boxes -in gameplay choices, most of the writetup gives the impression that classes would be replaced by tribes while still implying that at some point tribes would fulfilling that role. Hrothi, good frontline, brudvir good heavy skirmish, kypiq the archer in the trees and engineer, dras with poison dot ability.
so an optimal setup will need a mix of all , each fullfiling their viable tribes determined role. And gamers love optimizing things, and that will ruin the intended immersion more than balancing tribes would.
All the mmos without classes result in min-maxed viable pvp builds, getting those stats just right and gimmick funbuilds, with what the average player would make without use of guides fades away when endgame pvp appears, so if that is also boxed in by tribe selection it will create an atmosphere of people just rolling optimal tribes for a role and moving to their respective counties and duchies etc. I am not saying it will be easy to move around but once one kingdom will import their perfect army others will follow.
And some people say you can breed to determine that perfect statbox of a character you want, well that will require alot of dedication for an rng result and secondly it does not matter initialy and game needs to be commercially successfull to sustain itself and if people do not get the fun they are looking for in their first character, they will simply not play CoE and go play something else.
- It will create a very unequal distribution of serious players coming post release across tribes. There is almost no ingame reason to choose some of the tribes except aestethics and locations, with plenty of drawbacks to not choose them.
I am sure alot of players will choose based on aesthetics, or the quantity of fish in that biome, I dont doubt that, but those players tend not to wake up for base defense at 5 am. Players who wanna conquer and win will, and that is the issue. Not the distribution of players overall but distribution of players with interest in PvP, because that to'resk politics RP village will get smacked in the middle of the night while the janoan village will not because of the different player styles those tribes will attract.
how would I adress those issues:
I would delete any trace of that tribe selection help writeup and pretend it never happened.
In line with other descriptions I would create various sections which will determine initial character stats when picking tribe and location.
biological: Mostly upper limits of physical stats, which would be fairly close between tribes and balanced, lack of one compensated with another physical stat cap not taking into account any possible skills. so that if we put the tribes together and compare their stats we can say yeah that is balanced.
also the various stats that determine limits of biome resistances if really needed. but mainly determining just upper limits of physical features.
e.g. Janoa, and Dras are biologically basicaly the same (- stripes) there is no reason for them to not be able to achieve similar physical and intelectual feats from a biological perspective. however their initial experience would be very much different because of enviroment and skills.
enviromental base stats: since people move and adapt, based on what biome character has lived in their youth determining resistances and aptitude for various natural skills and knowledge of nature.:
eg. living in the swamp gives you poision resistance. living in the sterile cold enviroment does not, but it is not determined by the tribe but by spawn point. so a brudvir born and raised in a swamp should have some poison resistance.
Cultural - the cultural aspect would determine how much of that physical limit given to you by your bio stats is initially filled and the initial aptitudes that you have for learning various skills.
the culture not being determined only by the tribe but by the location buildup of tribes and professions
e.g. if you spawn in a hamlet it can be assumed that during the childhood you have worked and did physical labour hence your raw strenght will be higher. but you will not have aptitude to lets say learn skills that were not present in your hamlet.
on the other hand if you spawn in a oprhanage in a big city it can be assumed, you have picked up on the culture and skills present there have watched soldiers train etc. but the base strenght is not really increased because you most likely did not do physical labour from dusk to dawn. However your aptitude to learn is increased, reaching a decent point in various skills is easier, based on the proffesions in the spawn city.
going back to a janoa dras example: You would still have martial janoa, and intellectual dras but not because of direct tribe pick but because of the culture that the npcs of that culture and the enviroment they live in facilitate. the end potential is the same tough, they will just work harder for the gameplay they were not "raised"
so what changes with this system in inital part of somones gamepleay is really nothing much, Dras live in a swamp have a intelectually oriented society. That initial Dras is very much similar to what we are given right now but but the way we get to that base tribesman is different.
So if we put a neran in a majorly dras culture in a swamp county, he will pick up those same traits and aptitudes, but his upper limit will be neran. And the other way if there is a mixed settlment, it will incorporate traits and aptitudes of both tribe cultures into a character. so one will be starting with his "biological" limits filled to the point the enviroment and the culture facilitated.
Why would this make a good game:
So a character is a statbox even if we pretend it is not it still is an amount of numbers that enable you to play the game in a certain way. we also have a limited amount of gametime, so the initial goal of the player is to build their statbox to be able to play in their desired playstyle viably within a reasonable amount of time.
This way you can get the envisioned playstyles without limiting the player choice based on tribe pick, provided they are willing to put a bit of effort into it. Since the tribe itself would directly determine only stat caps (and i mean caps close to eachother) it would give more viability to certain picks be and it would not drive players away from some choices. It would facilitate all playstyles on the tribes with their
while incorporating cultural twists on those playstyles for most of the gametime.
It would also communicate that to the players in a more reliable manners without directly disencouraging them from playing various tribes which is imo just bad.
It would create incentive for lordsies to develop their cities as "spawnboxes" to lure new people to operate in their duchies or counties. if the culture in a city rather than tribe determines the skill aptitudes of a players character they would invest in various ways to attract players that they need, and we would get an more welcoming onboarding of new players.
you want to play a to 'resk warrior there is a county with mixed pop on the border, it is a fairly militarised town, if you spawn there you will have good aptitude for getting combat to a decent level soon and access to weapons and you can viably engage in pvp the next day because there is a war raging, but you will not have the "diplo aptitude" than a to'resk from inside the kingdom would have.
on the other hand if you want a chill experience trying to learn astronomy there is a town where there is an uni, you will not start and have much aptitude for- combat stats but you will have a really good aptitude for your intellectual endeavors. even if you are a brudvir.
with this you don't box people based on their tribe you determine that initial aptitude by location and culture and allow for alot of variation within a tribe.
so like in a classic mmo we can determine various "phases" of gameplay, that initial leveling or learning of skills. then we get to the fun stuff of more advanced content and the endgame where people do meta stuff. just that here that is timelocked, you have 1 year to get what you want out of your character.
so what we can assume here is that we would get
phase 1: initial feel of the game heavily influenced by the tribe for the first few months,
phase 2: Lets do something else phase where we could see very evenly balanced characters leveling more than their starting cultural ramps going beyond their biome resistances, exploring and trying out stuff. letting them be a viable actor for that period doing whatever they want .
phase 3: planning for retirement people decide what they want to specialize in knowledge of that their time is limited. With death and aging implying a gradual decrease in characters ability this is when people specialize mostly in line with what they wanna do this is where skills for an average player should peak,
phase 4: the hardmode, when the character is aged and it starts to take a tool and gradually decrease their stats presenting it as more of a challenge to do stuff. so aptitude for getting better at skills not purely intellectual should get diminished, and the viability if you wanna play as long as you should be determined by what you did in life, with again cultural aptitudes being in effect so you get that tribe envisioned feel again.
e.g. a soldier who was constantly building his skill to be as good as he can will be a viable warrior for longer than a soldier who was just good enough with his learning. but to compensate for the loss because he is dras he will use poisons because he can more easily increase or maintain that skill with his old age dementia kicking in because the aptitude for it is still higher because of that initial aptitude boost from his cultural enviroment making that skill decrease slower.
I think this could be a way to capture tribal diversity while not boxing peoples play style during the lifespan of their character with their pick and spawn location choice,
sry for the long text and bad english, but I just had too much time and found myself thinking about it. I dont want to be the knowitall gamer, telling you what to do but I sincerely wish you would reconsider how you intend to frame and present tribe based gameplay, and communicate that in a more clear manner .
At the moment I love the lore and the premise of the game, but this kind of stuff is really turning me away. Like the dev journal said it is about making a fun gameplay experience, not about sticking to a vision in parts where it is so obviously flawed..
the writeup i am reffering to
damn i cannot link it