Food rework! Or at least, my proposal for how it could look. #232
AnonymousPepper
started this conversation in
Ideas
Replies: 1 comment
-
|
Thanks for posting this, great write-up. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
0 replies
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
-
Okay, so. Food provisions proposal.
Categories are vegetables, fruits, proteins, dairy, luxuries, and calories, with the calorie need scaling as the settlement does and determining the overall rate of consumption. Naturally, vegetables and fruits would be split into individual crop types since, well, I suspect that's in the cards anyway, yeah? (Or if you really wanted to be a nerd about it you could do each of the essential nutrients; fat-soluble vitamins, water-soluble vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids, minerals, plus luxuries and calories... or even break them down further into their individual vitamins and minerals and such, i.e. A, B [or god help you the various essential types of it], C, D, K, so on and so forth, if you wanted to make people suffer - maybe as an optional difficulty setting?)
Each food has a value that it provides to one or more categories while in stock. When multiple foods are being provided, the consumption of each is weighted by how much it contributes to calorie need.
Any value of 100% or higher provides the full health bonus for fulfilling the nutritional needs of that category, with values under providing only a fraction, while values above 100% would partially roll over into the luxuries category. The luxuries category provides no health bonus, but instead begins increasing happiness, which would be a new stat that serves as a scalar on all useful settlement outputs. More types of food to meet your needs means more variety in your diet means happier people. This replaces the unity gain from food instead; unity can instead be produced in, well, any number of ways. A direct correlation between happiness and unity would be the easiest, but the sky is the limit there.
The calorie need is at 100% as long as any food is stored, but having more than 12 months of calories stored will start increasing it above 100%, rolling over to luxuries, with both the amount and the consumption rate proportionally (which serves to self-regulate excess food), with each additional month of stored food providing 5% more bonus and 2.5% more consumption; after all, there's tons of extra food that would otherwise go to waste, so your citizens are going to start eating more to meet the supply. You can choose just how high it can potentially go just by adding or removing markets, or changing their import values, if you want to be making excess food for any reason. You can add a cap to it, say, like, 500% or something, just because nobody can actually healthily eat that many calories a day, but the way it scales is self-regulating in that maintaining a 250% food surplus is extremely difficult and punishing even into the late-game with repeating techs, so you will reach an equilibrium state long before you get there. The Plenty of Food edict is removed, as this is essentially that cooked in, no pun intended.
Foods can provide less than 100% to a given category. For example, corn, wheat, and potatoes are primarily useful as a raw caloric source, but they are also sources of some vegetable nutrients. Meanwhile, higher-end products like, say, caviar or beef, would provide a good amount of protein, but also heavily contribute directly to luxuries. And of course foods like cake serve only to add to luxuries. You could make the values as granular as you want.
Obviously, on the crop selection UI, and in the in-game encyclopedia, the values provided by each crop or product are shown. Could even include a basic planner if you're up to it.
And if you want to be lazy and sub-optimal, there can also just be a multivitamin product that guarantees full health bonus (i.e. override the health bonus from all categories and set to 100), and then all you need to feed your people is calories. They will not be happy with it, but you've saved yourself a bunch of effort and space.
.
That's just the under the hood, though. From a player's perspective, what you see and need to do is: City has a set of nutrient needs. Each food provides an amount towards fulfilling one or more of those needs as long as it's in supply, and the information on that is made visible to the player. Exceeding any need starts making your citizens happier, which buffs their output for anything produced by the city.
You no longer need to provide specific foods in a "gotta catch em all" way. It's actually functionally similar in terms of its result to the basic food system, but it's much more immersive while not actually being much more complex as a player. And, it simultaneously provides less pressure to try and do each and every food and makes it more emotionally rewarding to try and give the little worker gnomes in your computer more types of food (specifically, by making it a happiness mechanic, because people on the whole love to make pops happy in any game).
.
What this all does, then, is make the food system much more scalable with adding more types of food, make it more realistic and immersive, allow for make it more fulfilling to provide as many types as possible, and simultaneously reduce the felt pressure on providing every single food type almost entirely through design rather than mechanics changes. Not that there aren't mechanics changes, there's quite a lot, but much of it's either more cosmetic than it looks or primarily serves to make a better base to expand upon later. The biggest actual change is actually tangential to it - the replacement of the direct unity gain from foods, and ideally from everything else you feed into a settlement, with a happiness value that can serve to affect all sorts of things that the city can do now or in the future.
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions