I have tried post apocalyptic worlds, high collab, low collab, medium collab, skill rate bonus weekends, mods, nearly everything I can think of to keep a server alive. But there is always an inevitable mid game collapse. Like 30 - 40 people day 1 and 2 and then by the end of day 7 there are 2-3 active players..
What is your dream server?
External link →Take a look on how the official White-Tiger server does it. First, it has some balancing changes, second it starts with a pre-established community and government concept that serves as a framework for people to play in, third our computer lab recipe requires several ten-thousands of goods from all professions in the game, fourth we usually have a world wonder monument built every cycle that requires lots of resources of all kinds. Alltogether despite the poor balancing we unfortunately still have in the game due to lack of fleshes out profession content aside from smiths and engineers, every player no matter which profession he plays has a use until the last days. It becomes grindy, though - but on the other hand you get a use for the endgame machinery that you usually would skip anyway, as you can shoot the meteor down the moment you get it on vanilla servers.
Obviously this doesn't work for every kind of players, but it's working well for us. Of course we also use an adapted worldgen with less water and more land for building projects and a higher difficulty than the highest default that we provide.
Oh yeh, and we focus a lot of players in the capital city, that is also built together. So pretty much three world wonders per cycle to create. That's enough to do for most people, of course not everyone is interested in that.
In the end it ever needs people that are willing to communicate, active admins that do organisational work or extremely engaged players that take that over and some kind of plan should be there. An evolving plan by the players while the game is running i've rarely seen, given a lot of people would need to step up and agree with each other at the same time - that works on whitelisted servers, but rarely on public ones.
On the server Side I have a huge issue, We're on day 8, relatively small world. And the Server has already used 11 GB of Storage. Also the servers slowly work there way up in RAM usage. The later in the game you get, RAM goes up extremely fast. The makers of this game need to create better code that doesn't put so much Hardship on servers and storage. I paid 30 dollars for the server i have and after 8 days it's almost maxed out on SSD storage. As for gameplay, My big issue is you grind for the first week, Then you have to grind twice as much during the second half with players dropping off that you really need to get the job done. There needs to be a lot more automation for mining such as conveyor belts. Maybe an Auto miner like they have at actual mines. A rail system will help a lot to. Then with Trees, I don't think they should auto grow back. Watching my server, I start with 196K plants, after 8 days I have like 210K. We're killing the world, putting buildings up, knocking down trees, yet the plant life in the world is increasing and the world is thriving. As for what the other person said, competition, yes, I wont join games that have been going on for a few days because there's no place for me on the server, every one is already days ahead of me and it's pointless to jump in at that point.
Eco's RAM usage does solely depend on the world size and the amount of built stuff, 11 GB you would maybe use in endgame on a 4 km² map, otherwise there is something wrong.
SSD usage is just because of all the statistics data we track and the default backup mechanism of creating one every half hour. If your server is really big, you can reach up to 8 GB of savegame data + 24 backups on default, totalling near 200 GB. That is perfectly normal. There is not much that could be done, it's just that much data that is produced in Eco to keep the law system going and being able to react to any action anyone on the server has ever done. You can of course reduce the amount of backups, frequency or don't make any at all if you're really restricted by SSD space.
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