Food Recipes & Bonuses Idea

[Sanvone]

From quite some time there is one thing that seems to be really out of place for me. Before I start I want you to notice that I'm sticking to lower difficulty games. Still watching some LP on higher % difficulty games I see the same trend.

Players almost never research food recipes (unless RNG punishes them really bad with starting food resource).


I think that there is several reasons:
- Abundance of food sources - if I counted correclty game currently has 73 food sources while you can effectively use 10 sources of food. There is 10 sourcess of "raw" food. You don't have to unlock food hexes as you do with most materials. Player starts with "Cooked Food" recipe researched which unlock additionaly 30 food types. So gathering 10 types of food isn't really much of an achievment.
- No research point from crafting food - well that I wouldn't change. The idea of cooking is to produce more food units which weight less.
- No impact benefit for collecting more than 10 food sources till late game when with huge party those +1 here and there summarize into bigger bonus. Compare it to every other crafting tab research and it falls flat in comparison.

I want for food to be as good option to research as others in research tab. I want all those different types of food (how often do you make Sausages or Pierogi?) to be showing up in games more often and a difference dictated by RNG across several plays as to what food my people are using. I'm not an expert on highest difficulties but I think that I get why it is important to craft food. Also my ideas shouldn't (on paper) influence game mechanics as I propose to change things with the least effort requiered) Here we go:


- First of all - let the food bonuses list be a cycle. So if you have 12 food types you are getting all normal bonuses and double the 2 food bonus. So with 20 food types player would receive double bonuses. More movement would encourga people playing on larger maps. It could be done pretty easily I believe with double/triple check marks.


- With that in mind: we should reduce number of food types in the game so those bonuses don't get too out of hand. Currently there is over 70 in a game. So you could get 7 times all food bonusses:

1) Merge all the same food types with different ingredients into one - they can retain different ways of getting and crafting points but should be counted as the same. This way we are getting from 77 sources to around 40-50.

2) Count the same category of raw food as one. Categories should be like in crafting: so Bird Meat and Meat would count as 1, Fruits and Exotic Fruits the same and so on. This way we are going from 10 raw sources to 5-6. And overal from 40-50 to 40.


From my perspective this would balance food research nicely as player would be really wanting those extra food benefits while it would become so much harder to get them. Also with less type sources we could see more variation.

Please share your opinions and ideas.

CheerS!

[abc.123]

i think each recipe player chooses to create himself should cost 1 rp. like, fish+fish+wood, for example. and ability to create recipes would be dependent from bulding - kitchen of some sort or whatever. the better materials were used to bulid it, the more recipes available to create :)

[A'vee]

I think the problem became more significant when we increased the amount of crafted food kinds. We did it, because a number of players asked for more varied foodstuffs (some really enjoyed playing with various recipes just for fun), but as a result, the raw food and cooking recipes available from the start is all you ever need in the game. There's no middle ground here I'm afraid, our mechanics won't allow to merge any items that were made of different resources into one type, to do that we would need to scrap some of the content. Which we added, based on previous community suggestions. I'm not convinced that's necessary.
Cycling bonuses would be doable (mechanics-wise) but then again it would encourage more tedious micromanagement to make the most out of all possible bonuses and if achieved - would have bad influence on balance.

[David]

Right now, the problem is that you get everything for free, right? You eat the non-scarce food from your village until it's time to cook up 10 foods (from what the monsters dropped) and do some big quests.

Make the starting recipie less flexible, so that a player will need to invest something to get to 10. Either gathering in the world, or buying one of the higher techs. It doesn't solve the relative scarcity problem, but at least the player has to consider food a bit.

Also, maybe this is just me, but I could go for some larger, size-standardized recipies. EX: they each take 25x, 25x, 5x, and produce 80x. Saves a few clicks at least.

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Proposal for larger food overhaul:
1) Lock some foods behind gathering research. Maybe higher tier foods are more powerful.
2) Starting recipie is much less flexible.
3) More variety of food producing buildings (or even a configurable one).
4) Longer food bonuses chart, with some real sexy stuff. Or maybe each food family has it's own bonus.
5) Some form of help for the annoyance of cooking a bunch of foods.