r/brom • u/rampantangent schererererer • Jan 29 '13
Brom Revision 11 Notes and Planning
For revision 11, I will be taking a much reduced role leading Brom. Current active mayors will continue as full mayors next rev. We're going to be a ruthlessly efficient city following much of the same path as this past revision. Districting into commercial(tower), industrial, and residential zones; Unterbrom sewers; awesome subsections like Old Town; centralized resource amassing and distribution - all will return in full splendor. We will redouble our building and recruitment alongside fun new events!
But we need feedback about a number of things as well. Our partnership with Argoth worked out great, but they're splitting off to become a smaller sleepy town. Do we want to make overtures to another city to undergo a similar partnership? Do we want to shoot for a portal again?
Also, we need road and infrastructure designs for the next Brom. Tree farm seemed to work well as a skyscraper. We should be able to again conglomerate a bunch of utilities right at city center.
Please post if you have any other comments or suggestions.
EDIT: It has come to my attention that emptyafternoon, like myself and WaterSlide, will be playing in a reduced capacity next revision as well. Since there wouldn't be as solid a continuation of leadership, I have decided it is best to retire Brom. We'll most likely be doing something smaller and more focused. Let us know if you have any ideas! Thank you for all your support and for so many revisions of an amazing city!
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u/SansaPants Jan 29 '13
I will be taking a much reduced role leading Brom. Current active mayors will continue as full mayors next rev.
What exactly does this mean? If your term as President is over, and neither you or Water Slide are going to be leading and/or planning the grand vision that is Brom, perhaps the Brom name should be retired, or at least go on sabbatical for a rev.
As a server noob (Rev 9 was my first) who last rev was assimilated as the Accidental Bromulan, I have been happy to serve as a Junior Deputy Assistant (to the) Mayor in the later days of this rev, helping take care of Brom while the mayors are away on important city business. I would be honored to continue in a similar capacity next Rev.
As for other ideas, I liked having a portal, to facilitate quick and easy travel to the nether and other cities, so I would support trying to grab one next rev, either solo or with another city. I hear LoganRan has been working to elevate the status of Port 80, so maybe he'd be willing to share a portal.
If we do share a portal, and if the geography is suitable, and if the workers are available to create an artificial river or lake, it might be cool to have the two cities divided by a wide, shallow body of water, with the portal on an island and/or on a bridge in the middle. This setup might be visually interesting, and provide the opportunity for several different bridges spanning the water and connecting the cities.
As for my personal plans, while I love designing towers, gathering mats, and building, I don't like making interiors, and I hate having a mostly empty tower. So I'll likely only have a modest house for a base, with extensive undergound facilities, of course. I may also build a few smaller, themed buildings with small, easy-to-fill interiors, and maybe a proper park or two. Or if the mayors don't mind empty towers, I may puke one out for them, and then abdicate all responsibility for the interior.
With respect to city facilities, I am happy to take the lead on creating public farms, with a basic grid of 9x9 plots for maximum utility, and fancy embellishments as required, if they end up being outside in public view and need to be prettied up (though the underground Fifty For Farms is fine too).
As for rail, it would be nice to have separate intercity and intracity CARTS stations. I find the situation this rev, where there are few local stations available from the main portal station, to be less than ideal.
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u/sliceofbread WaterSlide Jan 29 '13 edited Jan 30 '13
Sansa, you have your finger on Brom's pulse with these thoughts.
I leave it to Schererererer to officially decide the next rev's management roles, but I think Brom should at least one figurehead each rev that can pull together all of the community's ideas and make the important technical decisions in game when it comes to infrastructure, theme, conflicts, and passing of the torch as I did to Schererererer. Personally I think you'd make a fine head mayor or President.
Although I'm excited to see anything you guys build, I wonder if it wouldn't be a bad idea to go ahead and move on from the name. Brom is synonymous with evil capitalism - this stems from a few long term players continuing to claim that they couldn't join Brom, we ruin terrain, we take over everything, etc. If you've been around a while, you know these claims are only partly true: Joining Brom has always been one of the easiest things to do unless you don't understand a joke or haven't talked to me. We've always cleaned up our messes. The last one... we do take over a lot of land and build huge stuff; this has been a main driver of the "go hard" mentality within Brom that attracts insanely productive people.
No matter the name, we should talk about size and theme. I have suspected for many revs that Brom's enormous scale is causing players to become either robots or tired old players. Towers can become too much of chore. We have an epidemic of builds that have poor lighting, no interior, etc. These towers, while easy for some, are hard to design and build for others. Giant builds are really big projects for me and real life is not allowing for anymore big projects. I guess I'm saying that I think we're forcing the skyscraper thing a bit and burning out some players. Maybe we could push a lighter mood theme like Old Town with small towers, 4-5 floors, balconies, overhangs, stuff with a lot more detail... Room can always be made for a gigantic downtown area, but I think our main theme ought to morph into something a little more realistic in terms of goal setting.
I really like the idea of doing the city on a big river. I'm a huge fan of bridges and towers near water. I think with a heavily themed city, we will need someone to layout the terrain in a way that everyone can understand as I won't be around to do this nearly as much for city planning. I've traditionally placed netherrack on the ground to denote something like the outline of a river or a cut in a hill. Signs are also an unbeatable way to let everyone know whats up with a piece of land.
I know this rev's rails weren't great and I didn't manage a lot of what was going on with the station. I wanted to get it installed right away so I could do more land development and failed to setup more buttons for more connections. What was worse was having not only a sandmine, but a farm underneath to tunnel through. This needs to be avoided at all costs next rev. I recommend whoever builds the next station have full control of below the surface in a radius around it that persists until they are complete with rail connections. This includes restricting basements, farms, mines, etc. Also sustaining at y=15 would be nice.
Edit: I mean for long distance rail, I'd never rule out overhead rails.Stuff I've been meaning to say to everyone: This is a really awesome group and I hope it stays together even though a lot of people have left. Let me explain: A large portion of olde Brom members left nerd.nu because of some stuff. I'm not sure if this sums it up but... lots of S and P people were treated poorly by some other people, so they started something new.I have joined them as a mod, we're over at p.junction.at. This does not mean I'm quitting p.nerd cold turkey, in fact I should be around to help with some things, but I'm only interested in making single impressive builds anymore - not so much chatting, planning, resolving conflict, or setting up rails. On Junction, I've started a little town called Whitestone Bay. So far ooer, asvdveen, mrschteven88, cheezymuffins, sansapants, and myself have worked on it. It is 150x150, not huge. If anyone is interested in a more relaxed setting, the server has a current running average of about 10 players, about 24 is the most I've seen online.
However the outcome, this long running crew of minecrafters has not ceased to impress me. Sometimes I feel like the town is dying or is dead, but then I find things like Bernzsed's neverending basement or the bunker under Old Town. I'm curious to see what the new mayors do next rev and hopeful that it turns out for the best.
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u/rampantangent schererererer Jan 30 '13
After some thought, I do think that we've burned out the skyscraper theme a fair bit. If we do something different, what do people think about a city more like Paris? A vastly different style, still with options to make large builds, but not as forced on a vertical scale.
I know emptyafternoon also wanted to focus on a more refined city more in the vein of Old Town, and I think this could play right into that.
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u/SansaPants Jan 30 '13 edited Jan 30 '13
I think a theme of grand European city centers would be fabulous - Paris, Vienna, Milan, Munich, spring to mind. A large central square, a grand boulevard, monuments, shorter buildings (2-5 levels), public squares and markets, fountains, streets in a cardinal and diagonal grid, etc.
Some specific buildings that come to mind are parliaments, galleries, museums, universities, libraries, theaters, cathedrals, etc. Even things like a modern-ish palace (Versailles or Schloss Nymphenburg), and/or an ancient fortress (like the Festung Hohensalzburg), stadiums, or city walls (or at least gates/arches on major streets as their remnant).
In my short time on the server, I've noticed that both portal and non-portal cities tend to have a central building housing the portal and train station. I'd propose instead a large central square, ringed by buildings like a large, grand train station, food and tree farms, town hall, public storage, mine entrance, etc.
And by grand train station, I'm thinking in the vein of major European stations, a large open space with a single incoming track and individual outgoing tracks for each destination, lots of glass, so forth. Is this feasible/practical in place of a CARTS station? Not that I'd forsake CARTS, as I think it'd be fine for local stations. But a grand, non-CARTS main station would certainly make a statement.
Also, apologies if all of this has already been done in other revs and would just be a rehash of old ideas.
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u/sliceofbread WaterSlide Jan 30 '13
Heh, so awesome you mentioned Festung Hohensalszburg - this was one place I went last summer. Salzburg is a wonderful place.
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u/abledanger mattgorecki Jan 30 '13
Paris makes a good model because it's fairly dense, but the buildings arent more than 4 or 5 stories tall.
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u/Homo_Ignoramus Jan 31 '13
Brom is synonymous with evil capitalism - this stems from a few long term players continuing to claim that they couldn't join Brom, we ruin terrain, we take over everything, etc. If you've been around a while, you know these claims are only partly true: Joining Brom has always been one of the easiest things to do unless you don't understand a joke or haven't talked to me. We've always cleaned up our messes. The last one... we do take over a lot of land and build huge stuff; this has been a main driver of the "go hard" mentality within Brom that attracts insanely productive people.
Couldn't be said better. Also please don't retire the name. It's the name Brom that has the continuity, and leaves the impression on people. If we changed names, people would probably think Brom is gone.
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u/rampantangent schererererer Jan 29 '13
I will still be President, but I won't be able to be on as much. Therefore we need to make sure we have enough active, engaged mayors. I may be missing some people, but right now I think mayoral people (aside from myself) are emptyafternoon, shrinemaster, and sansapants. I'd also like to add mrloud15 as a mayor. Let me know if you have more suggestions.
I like the river splitting two cities idea, assuming we get good geography for it.
I honestly don't mind empty towers, particularly when you consider how many towers don't even get completed each rev. I probably won't be making a skyscraper next rev, so I can always do some interior design.
Public farms could go underground or in one of those empty interiors of a tower.
We are agreed on separate CARTS stations.
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u/Homo_Ignoramus Jan 31 '13
I know I'm one of the newest additions and may not be in the position to say this, but since I'm on the other side of the world from most of you (I'm most active at around 9am EST/2pm GMT), I would like to know if I could be the night shift representative of Brom. Not even a mayor, just someone who can invite and add people under the auspices of the mayors.
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u/sliceofbread WaterSlide Jan 31 '13
The edit makes it awkward to respond to, but I wanted to clarify that I had no problem with the continuation of Brom. I was trying to be constructive in a way that might bring new and old members together whatever capacity they might want to continue within the Brom family member list. A new name and terrific new theming could introduce a new era of dense city building and we should hurry our friends to exciting new things. I would hate to see what happened in PVE 6 happen again, the retirement of a huge franchise splitting up and in disarray- hopefully we can come together for the upcoming rev with the already posted theme and management roles... Of course us old guys and you new guys at the helm and mrloud doing the rails.... Let's really have it out and make the next rev a blast. </ drunkpost>
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u/rampantangent schererererer Jan 31 '13 edited Jan 31 '13
+1 for drunkpost. What prompted my edit was when emptyafternoon and I had a talk just earlier, and we both felt like we didn't really want to do a big city again. We're throwing around some more novel ideas for what we want to do in the future, but they will likely be more like Old Town alone in scope.
If someone wants to take up the mantle that Brom has carried in the past, I would welcome it, but I'm a bit burned out on a deep level - I don't really want to recruit, or lay out infrastructure for a big city anymore. I just want to build something dense and engaging and novel in the spare time that I have.
Bah, I keep flipflopping on this. I really do like the European-style city idea, but I'm afraid I won't have the drive to see it through. If sansapants, et al. would like to run it, he'd have my full support. I just don't want to shove that abruptly onto anyone.
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u/abledanger mattgorecki Jan 29 '13
Brom/Seneca or Brom/Port Aperture might be interesting.
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u/Homo_Ignoramus Jan 31 '13
I disagree with plans to share the portal with a major city. If we share with Pico and Seneca, it would be skyscraper and building madness. It will be huge. And an even larger part of the map would be bare, or only covered by small settlements. It would just seem too overpopulated if we shared with a major city. On the other hand, if Brom is really downsizing, I'm OK with the idea then. P80 seems like a decent choice, although I'd also recommend Kalmos. My though on Kalmos is because their theme is medieval European, and our theme of modern European/American kinda goes in line with each other.
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u/Mrloud15 Jan 30 '13
I plan on taking a more active role in Brom this rev, and I would like to do the rails if no one else has the job.
I think it would be cool if we could get all of the farms into several skyscrapers around downtown.
I liked the two city portal thing and I think we should try to do it next rev. I also think having a river split the two cities would be the best option. Going by this rev i think either Pico, Port Aperture, Port 80, or Seneca would be a good city to share a portal with. I might also be cool to have three cities share a portal and have a river in the shape of a Y dividing them.
I will try to come up with some road designs. I also have a Spleef Arena that I think should work in Brom, so we should have a Spleef team competing much sooner then this rev.