Mini Empires: Seperating the Kings From the Peasants

[AdinX]

!CAUTION!
This thread is about mini empires! If you are easily offended, don't like being told you're wrong, don't like to roleplay, don't like me, or you partake in jumping on bandwagons (ex. "mini empires sucks because its not even real"), IT IS ADVISED THAT YOU CLOSE THIS BROWSER!
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK

MINI EMPIRES

Quick terms for those of you unfamiliar with Mini Empires:

RP - Role Play. A role-playing game is a game in which the participants assume the roles of characters and collaboratively create stories. Participants determine the actions of their characters based on their characterisation, and the actions succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines. Within the rules, they may improvise freely; their choices shape the direction and outcome of the games. Definition courtesy of RagnaTheBroedge
Mini Empires - A game mode much like a freebuild, however with a dedicated theme. Players build miniature-scale THINGS, be it a plane, a crane, a house or a lake, it's always "MINI"
MERP - Mini Empires Role Play. It takes the elements of role playing, and includes mini empires that people often 'control' and interact with. Often times, intra-player interactions are highly common, and most times necessary.
GODMOD - Verb. To godmod is to play mini empires unfairly. Ex. Player1 and Player2 are at war, each have 10 units in the fight. Player1 is winning the fight after 30 minutes of role playing, and Player2 gets mad and doesn't wanna lose, so he spawns twenty catapults and claims that he's the victor, because of his catapults. This is godmodding because the catapults were spawned randomly, irrelevantly, and in the heat of battle when a player was on the verge of losing.

^^ Those are common terms ^^
vv These are less common terms vv

Dwarven MERP - larger sized Mini Empires, the focus is still on 'miniaturized' builds, however everything is made slightly larger than a standard mini empires. This is often the most realistic sizing for mini empires, allowing for high detail and fairly large builds. HIGH BRICK COUNT. This is also the type of MERP OP plays
Host Honor Code - Within MERPs, sometimes hosts take up a code of honor. When a player wishes to be stealthy, sneak attack someone or save a secret weapon, they must notify the host for it to be a valid usage, otherwise it is considered godmodding. The honor code comes in place when it comes to this information: The host cannot give away this information, or use it to their benefit.
Dup Plate - A dup plate is where dedicated MERP players store all of their buildings. The term 'dup' comes in when it comes time to use or play with a dup plate; the player loads his/her dup plate, and 'dupes' their creations into the battlefield/map. This allows for well-made/pre-made units and structures, without the hassle of building everything on the spot.

THE ISSUE AT HAND
Lately within Blockland, there have been increasing amounts of low quality MERP and Mini Empires servers springing up, all attempting to bring in large groups of players, and only lasting for about a day at most.

Here are the problems I've found with this:
• It is a waste of time for everyone. MERPs are much like a book; they require a beginning, a middle and an end. Writing only the beginning of a book leaves a feeling of incompleteness (in most cases) and is a bad feeling to have. When you create a race of sentient beings, and you give them homes and creatures and weapons, and you defend their land against attackers and war, you grow fond of your creation. You create an emotional attachment. Much like how in a book you grow emotionally attached to a character. Except for you, it's an entire mini-country.
• just as evil begets evil and good begets good, building poorly begets building poorly and vice versa. Many hosts put little effort into their servers, mostly with the intent to get involved in MERPs for the first time, and end up catching roughly 10-20 dedicated MERP players. For experienced MERP players, this is like opening up a box of chocolates, to find a big, ripe turd. For inexperienced players, they see this and believe "Oh, this is normal, I should build this way, as this is acceptable." I got news for you; it's not.
• We talk about you. Just like all the furries know eachother in and out of their thread, the MERP players know eachother, and we talk. So when a new player hosts a server, we all check it out, and 80% of the time we leave and laugh about you behind your back about how bad the server was. Want to avoid this? The solution is coming...
• GET EXPERIENCE BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO HOST! This is difficult in some scenarios, I understand. On servers like Gentoo's Mini Empires, he requires players to be knowledgeable of MERPs and fairly familiar with the building style. On other servers, players are much more willing to show new players the ropes of roleplay and how to build. Art is all about developing your own style, but you can't expect to paint a portrait before you can hold the brush.
• They last for 1-2 days, then they quit. We WANT people to join the MERP community! servers full of exotic and attractive empires are fun! Wars with 6 people and tanks and turrets and bombs are EXCITING! And you can be a part of that! But we CANNOT do this if we have seven servers that host every day, and only one or two of them have legitimate builds, and then one at best has some good role-play functionality.




Because I can't address these points any further without actually discussing it between members of the community, I would like to reflect my thoughts on what I most commonly find on other MERP servers in terms of builds. This part* is difficult to do sadly, but I'll do the best I can.

!!DISCLAIMER!!
Not everyone is perfect. Not everyone can paint a picasso. Not everyone can figure out how to event a brick to explode. I know. Everyone has their varying degrees of skill. What ISN'T okay is carelessness, or bigotry in the face of suggestions and improvements.

 
GOOD SCI-FI TANK                                                                                  BAD SCI-FI TANK
The tank on the left is much more realistic than the tank on the right for a variety of reasons, the main one being scale: The tank on the right can hardly fit ONE person inside, and it would be cramped. The tank on the left has room for your standard tank crew of 3-4, the turret is a seperate unit from the body of the tank, and overall the tank has room for electronics, munitions, engines, etc etc. The tank on the right is a cardboard box with a peashooter for a gun.

 
GOOD SCI-FI PLANE                                                                                  BAD SCI-FI PLANE
The plane on the left is fairly large and capable of carrying multiple units/light vehicles, has suitable emitters, a smooth and attractive roosterpit, some form of wings/aerial propulsion, etc. The plane on the right is a twig with wings and some flaming engines. Seriously. Stop with the fire emitters. Planes don't emit fire from their engines. Not even jets do that. It's basically fuel leaving a showerhead and then being lit on fire, then re-pressurized with compressed air that pushes the plane. The wings and overall proportion are that of a glider at best. These are too damn common. STOP.

 
GOOD COLONIAL HOME                                                                                  BAD COLONIAL HOME
The home on the left ACTUALLY FITS A FAMILY. The home on the right is a TOOL SHED. Look at the size of a single unit. If one person takes up a 1x1x2F area, your 2x2x1 'house' cannot comfortably fit 12 people. That's complete bullstuff and you're overcrowding. The home on the left comfortably fits 4-7, and includes other details like a chimney, door, lights/windows and a second floor. Also: VARY YOUR BUILDINGS. Quit duping around the same damn house 100 times!

 
GOOD MEDIEVAL WALL                                                                                  BAD MEDIEVAL WALL
The wall on the left can actually mount soldiers. It has parapets so soldiers can duck-down to avoid line of fire. It is made of wood and has support beams bellow the tower. The walls are not freakishly large or tall. The wall on the RIGHT... I'm not even going to bother you guys should get the picture by now.

literal side note:
Yes I am still working on CityMod's build, however I like to build and play with my mini empires now and again, if you have any problems with this please message me your complaints and we can sort out a time for you to build an entire city for Vaux and Bran in your free time to meet the expectations of an estimated 200-2000+ players

[Ad Bot]

[OrkusBorkus]

oo can i pley :)

[Operator¹]

so basically you want people to use halfbricks.




this thing is gonna be a huge target and it has an extremely large profile. It's like a metal coffin for the pilot and whoever dares step onboard because the pilot won't be able to see what is happening behind, below, and even to the sides. You deliberately put little to no effort into that plane to the right and I'm not going with that. Plus, it will probably be shredded by a fighter in the style of the incredibly stuffty low-effort example you built on the right.



I can't see a proportionate figure living in this comfortably.

[AdinX]

so basically you want people to use halfbricks.
Not necissarily, I just think that people need to put more effort into their builds, because what tends to happen is a house is 2 bricks and a plane is 9.



this thing is gonna be a huge target and it has an extremely large profile. It's like a metal coffin for the pilot and whoever dares step onboard because the pilot won't be able to see what is happening behind, below, and even to the sides. You deliberately put little to no effort into that plane to the right and I'm not going with that. Plus, it will probably be shredded by a fighter in the style of the incredibly stuffty low-effort example you built on the right.
That's not a fighter in that example, it's a cargo carrier. Cross-bread between a V-22 Osprey and a C-130 Hercules essentially was the goal. The craft has 1 double-barrel 45mm rotary cannon on each side, a single 78mm cannon on the back and a 45mm gattling cannon on the front. It's also capable of deploying flares to offput missile locks. And this has all been evented and used one 2-3 mini empires servers before. It works perfectly fine. It's not meant to be a fast fighter, it's a unit mover. It's how I scoot my troops around quickly but safely.
The fighter on the right didn't even have a gun on it, that slipped my mind.



I can't see a proportionate figure living in this comfortably.
A proportionate figure takes up ABOUT a .75x.75x2F space, that house is roughly a 2.25x2.25x1 area, on each floor. Being that it's a log cabin and not your standard edition modern home, no, I'm gonna have to disagree, I can see that being a very realistic colonial-era log cabin home. They weren't roomy mansions after all.

Responses in bold

Edit:
I was bored and my save was broken because I disabled some stuff, so because I fixed it and I recently installed FRAPS I wanted to record a video of the carrier. The video is short, only 29 seconds, nothing too crazy special. Just thought I'd show it off so we don't have another incident where people think it's a big mass of flying bricks I slapped together as an example when really I spent 2 hours making several designs for a carrier, as well as eventing it to actually function.
Video HERE

[Operator¹]

okay good luck actually living in that space (with 4 other people)

I should assume that all residents are poor peasants that don't have any luxuries except for that giant military force which eats all of the money the nation generates

[ZombiLoin]

I don't see why people don't just use cubes instead of rounds for the people. two cubes stacked ontop of each other > two rounds stacked ontop of each other.

[Operator¹]

I don't see why people don't just use cubes instead of rounds for the people. two cubes stacked ontop of each other > two rounds stacked ontop of each other.

and then you try to build a wall next to them.

[Benjamin Lopez]

okay good luck actually living in that space (with 4 other people)

I should assume that all residents are poor peasants that don't have any luxuries except for that giant military force which eats all of the money the nation generates

You're forgetting that Mini Empires is on a much smaller scale
If you were to take the log cabin in the picture and put it on a more realistic scale it could easily fit a family of 4 or 5 people.
NINJA EDIT:Also, the people in Mini Empires are much smaller then actual humans thus they wouldn't take up that much space.

[Operator¹]

You're forgetting that Mini Empires is on a much smaller scale
If you were to take the log cabin in the picture and put it on a more realistic scale it could easily fit a family of 4 or 5 people.
NINJA EDIT:Also, the people in Mini Empires are much smaller then actual humans thus they wouldn't take up that much space.

I know that mini empires is on a smaller scale- this is pretty obvious, same with the people in mini empires- I've been playing mini empires since v15. This isn't new. I keep seeing the argument that you should take realism into account when that's thrown out the window, since the scaling to a person composed of those two bricks isn't much better.

When you say that people shouldn't use two bricks for a house, but claim that a more detailed build with the same fundamental scaling problem is 'more comfortable' for the little family living in it; you should really take into account that both builds represent the same goddamn thing and it's basically a pissing match to see who can build the best looking house that plays such an insignificant role in a much larger build. Seriously, who is going to admire the log cabin in actual gameplay?, they'll just look at it the same as they would as a slightly less detailed building. So unless it's a display piece, it seriously doesn't matter how detailed your lowest tier housing is, because at the end of the day, it's more bricks for less. Many mini empires servers are a cesspit of vanity, you're not winning any points for having an ultra-detailed cabin that doesn't end up in the damn gallery most of the time. Almost all of the ships I have built have never formed into their own gallery topics because they're basically chess pieces; the only thing special about them is that they were built by me- that's pretty much it. In the end you're spending more time perfecting some random hut than actually roleplaying, this is the bane of mini empires servers for me.

If you're criticizing a slightly less detailed building, that represents the same object, for 'realism', you should take a look at your own stuff before flinging comments at people that don't want to invest 30 minutes into making a 4x4 house.

[AdinX]

Like I previously stated in the OP
I do Dwarven MERPs
And I also added in the disclaimer that people have different styles

Our dilemma is how much detail is too much
AND how realistic are the builds.
I can't get on my computer at the moment, but here is how I've always imagined MERP building interiors. Take the full size of your building, and use vertical plates to show the walls inverted. A 2x2 area end up being large enough to fit a 1x1 brick. A 4x4 area could maybe fit a 3x3

Yes, a lot of mini empires stuff ends up being chess piece type deals. Gentoo builds jaw dropping MERPs and you never see anything in gallery. Kris is lord of all things sci-fi MERP, but again: nothing. That's because it's just too minor to post. Kris's largest ship, Gaia, was roughly 10k bricks if I recall correctly.

The main point I try to make in this topic is not how things are represented, but how poorly they are made and represented. I think the tank images best demonstrate this. My tank took 5 minutes plus an extra minute to zone it and dupe the turret to rotate. The one on the right took 5 seconds.

It also steps into the realm of meta-gaming. If I take 5 minutes and you take 5 seconds, realistically you're in the wrong because you can just end up duping around that tank of yours a couple hundred times, and now you've crossed the threshhold of "simple" to "abusive"
But it's when people build low quality/low effort builds and advance faster, that it upsets me.

Tell me operator, if you were to make a modern day battleship, how wide would it be? Long? Tall?
If you answer 1x, 8x and 3x
And I answer 15x, 64x and 10x
You will finish first
And in the extra day it takes me to finish my vessel, you will progress more.

But then when it comes time for war and I have my normal looking battleship vs your representation, it looks silly.

See what I'm trying to say?

[RagnaTheBroedge]

Dumb nitpicking about dumb things: The thread.

[heedicalking]

i just want a miniempires server. players are the kings and they are given a golden brick to mark their castle. if the golden brick is destroyed, the civilization falls. fights actually take place so fortress design matters, and buildings have HP. players place down baseplates to determine the building type. the king can command his bots to attack. the king can command the bots through an observer mode, but is limited to his bots line of sight. things like elevation and terrain actually matter, since there will be actual fighting.

it could be played with either bots, regular players, or both. if played with players, they could choose to join a kingdom or start their own if there is still available room. like the servers we have now, there would need to be moderation because i doubt this would work without it.

[Operator¹]

so basically you're saying that people should build x way because it looks silly if they don't

[Tiel]

i just want a miniempires server. players are the kings and they are given a golden brick to mark their castle. if the golden brick is destroyed, the civilization falls. fights actually take place so fortress design matters, and buildings have HP. players place down baseplates to determine the building type. the king can command his bots to attack. the king can command the bots through an observer mode, but is limited to his bots line of sight. things like elevation and terrain actually matter, since there will be actual fighting.

it could be played with either bots, regular players, or both. if played with players, they could choose to join a kingdom or start their own if there is still available room. like the servers we have now, there would need to be moderation because i doubt this would work without it.

This sounds really freaking cool. What's it called?

Since last week I've been yearning to figure out how mini-empires would work with actual bots.

[AdinX]

Dumb nitpicking about dumb things: The thread.

!CAUTION!
This thread is about mini empires! If you are easily offended, don't like being told you're wrong, don't like to roleplay, don't like me, or you partake in jumping on bandwagons (ex. "mini empires sucks because its not even real"), IT IS ADVISED THAT YOU CLOSE THIS BROWSER!
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK

Sorry I didn't make that clear enough for you, allow me to re-state what this thread is:
It's a mini empires thread about how lately there have been stuffty servers, and a large amount of the MERP playerbase, including myself, are tired of seeing them. It's not "dumb nitpicking," it's the equivalent of building a big red spam box next to one of Sylvanor's buildings. It looks bad, plays bad, and it ruins the content of the server. Would you rather see 20 poorly made houses, or one REALLY nice house on gallery?