Nerf Cooked Meat

[prytoclasm]

Dislike cooked meat? Get the herbivore mutation.

[moist_zombie]

I heard Carnivore allows you to see tags on the meat concerning what animal it came from?? If I recall correctly anyway, I’d love to see that feature given to all generic characters (without having Carnivore, of course…)… Guess that’d rob some thunder from Carnivore though…

[JanBlair]

Like the OP, I was also thinking the cooked meat is a little too powerful because of its accessibility. There are several factors that are not included in the game that could really change this and make people cook things beside meat.

First of all the meat is all the same, whether it be a bear, fox, rat, or squirrel. Honestly there are huge differences between each kind of meat. Eating cooked rat should not have a positive morale bonus. Secondly I have never been happy to eat bland meat. Your character can literally have meals of unsalted, unseasoned meat every single day. I realize that it is the apocalypse and everything, but I still would not have a positive morale from this. There should also be different qualities of cooked meats (anyone ever play unreal world?). A wood oven or fireplace should produce better quality of meat than an open fire during rain. Eating badly cooked meat should have severe morale penalties, and if it is too raw would probably cause disease. Another issue is the nutritional value. It is very hard to live off of a meal of meat every single day. We could implement scurvy or something but that may be a bit extreme. But vegetables and grains should also be required to be healthy in the apocalypse. An expansion in farming would also aid with this.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Hrm, scurvy & other nutritional diseases sound cool.

Just do the check once a day, put some flags on foods/use existing flags, (meat, vegetables, etc. Could go as far as potassium, salt, etc though), and if the character doesn’t consume a hidden amount of these they’ll start to get sick.

Question: do we really want to clue in the players, or should we set up an ‘aha’ moment when they realize eating chips all day every day wasn’t a good diet?

Idea that involves a lot of work: include an fda food label on pre-apocalypse foods. Players can estimate their daily needs from the percentages & values listed on different foods.

[General_Patton]

Perhaps nutrition should be split along the lines of calories, protein, and vitamins/minerals. Calorie deficiency is the only one that is directly lethal. Protein and vitamin deficiencies each have their own status effects as well as generically impacting your health. So you can live off of any repetitive diet, but going to the extra effort of getting some of both meat and fruit/veggie every few days would keep you in top shape. Only downside to this is having to go through and specify new numbers for all the edibles. I suppose this also calls for a change to the vitamins item.

[JanBlair]

Honestly I would be okay with going through and writing values for each item. But this may be a bit complex. My only reason for mentioning this idea was because I want a reason to craft the other food items. I am sure there would be easier ways to accomplish that. However, if someone is interested in doing that I can certainly help with the values.

[conductorbosh]

For an item that can be made with no skill whatsoever, using tools that are available from minute 1 in the game, using a resource that is ridiculously plentiful and renewable and takes only 5 minutes to prepare, cooked meat is one of the best items in its category.

Dude, Cataclysm isn’t purely “gamey.” There are aspects of simulation to it and a reasonable level of realism has always been part of the design goals.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s unbalanced from a game perspective. In a real life survival situation, meat would not only be plentiful/renewable, but cooking it would require relatively little skill and be possible using basic tools.

If you’re talking about nerfing the morale bonus I’m all with you though. I just don’t believe that meat’s availability, nutrition, or production difficulty should be altered.

[General_Patton]

If I had to come up with a first draft of mechanics for Protein and Vitamin hidden stats, I’d say give them minimum values of 0 and maximum values of 1000 and let the Blood Analysis bionic reveal the exact value. Every 7 minutes (70 turns) they decrease by 1. If we have the player lose 1 Hunger whenever Protein is decremented, then shifting some of meat’s Calorie value toward Protein would automatically give us something akin to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation.

As Health works now, it tends towards an equilibrium point of 0. Maybe change that to be -10+Protein/100+Vitamin/100.

I feel like having 500-1000 Protein should give bonuses of 0-10 Speed and 0-2 Strength, and 499-0 Protein should give penalties of 1-20 Speed, 1-5 Str, 1-2 Dex, 1-3 Int and 1-2 Per.

500-1000 Vitamin would be +0-2 Dex, Int, and Per. 499-0 Vitamin would be -1-3 Dex, -1-2 Int, and -1-3 Per.

One important thing to keep in mind when balancing the values on different foods is keeping the ratios on most foods such that you need to eat more than survival amounts to be healthy. Less than 5 Prot/Vit per 7 Cal, probably about a 1:2 ratio on most food that isn’t supposed to be excessively nutritious.

The Vitamins item is probably worth 50 points of Vitamin, and might need to be renamed Multi-Vitamins. A Chemistry Set recipe for Multi-Vitamins wouldn’t be too out of place, and a new Protein Bar item using Protein Powder would be a good addition.

[Heruedhel]

The nutrition value system is interesting but it has a few of downsides in my opinion.
First, it adds an extra layer of values that the player has to keep balanced for no other reason than to keep them balanced.
Second, it can be become a hassle for modders, and we might end up with (lazy) mods just keeping these at default values.
third, it kinda contradicts what I understand to be one of the game’s design philosophies, which is that we don’t want to punish the player for NOT playing in a certain way.

Here are a few counter ideas that I will throw on the table just for the sake of argument, they suffer some of the same problems, but we’re brainstorming.

[ol][li]Food is a drug: Food can give more varied effects than just mood boosts. The effects should be more subtle than drug effects, but longer lasting. possible downsides: Too gamey, code intensiveas we have to program a new set of effects and effect degradation for food[/li]
[li]Food counter: keep track of the last X items of food the player had. if the item you are about to eat is repeated frequently in the list it might suffer penalties to its morale and nutrition values, or conversely, if it is absent from the list it might get a boost. You might get a message like “Cooked meat? Again!?!” if your character is starting to suffer penalties from a certain dish. This shouldn’t be too code intensive, it’s a pretty simple addition, and maybe not as gamey as the previous suggestion as you just have to make sure there’s reasonable variety in your diet.[/li][/ol]

I might actually make a mod for the last idea if people here like it. But some values, like list length and penalties/rewards should be discussed.

[infectedmochi]

[quote=“Heruedhel, post:49, topic:4120”]Food counter: keep track of the last X items of food the player had. if the item you are about to eat is repeated frequently in the list it might suffer penalties to its morale and nutrition values, or conversely, if it is absent from the list it might get a boost. You might get a message like “Cooked meat? Again!?!” if your character is starting to suffer penalties from a certain dish. This shouldn’t be too code intensive, it’s a pretty simple addition, and maybe not as gamey as the previous suggestion as you just have to make sure there’s reasonable variety in your diet.

I might actually make a mod for the last idea if people here like it. But some values, like list length and penalties/rewards should be discussed.[/quote]
If you are planning on making a mod for that (which is awesome btw) I suggest you take a look at this thread. Although not directly related, it outlined a love/hate system and IMHO worth looking into for reference and ideas.

[Ratinod]

I have some idea.
It adds meaning to cook a variety of dishes.
[URL=http://radikal.ru/fp/513f437c1813454e8024555ff6ed71bb][/URL]
http://s020.radikal.ru/i721/1311/0b/f84c78c284d9.png -fullscreen
[URL=http://radikal.ru/fp/490318b5460b458fbf4e44da132305af][/URL]
http://s020.radikal.ru/i717/1311/a8/d74f29150c10.png -fullscreen
I apologize for my bad English.

[Inadequate]

The problem with that is that carnivore characters would be literally unplayable after sixty days.

[JanBlair]

Yeah, I don’t know if we should add a penalty for eating the same type of food over and over again. I know plenty of people who do that. I instead think that we need to add a penalty for bland foods altogether. No offense, but eating a chunk of meat that has been cooked over a fire does not seem at all appealing to me. It would be flavorless and probably chewy. That’s where things like salted meat come in. In addition a system like what General Patton mentioned would be awesome.

[Ratinod]

The problem with that is that carnivore characters would be literally unplayable after sixty days.

Perhaps you’re right. Need to make adjustments. For example, sleep is given by FAL -1 hourly. In addition to this, FAL will shoot drinks. In addition, FAL will reduce drinks. Certainly a good balance should be followed. As in a good fighting game it can not be achieved at the first attempt.

Personally, I really like this system, since it pushes to prepare new dishes. At this point, a huge pile of recipes around collecting dust. No incentive to use them. Maybe just for fun or role-play. And this is just a suggestion. If found to be different, a better solution, I think no one will mind.

[Heruedhel]

@Ratinod: one thing I didn’t see in your formula is how FAL increases. Can you explain table 1 in more detail please?

The way I see it working is as follows:
1- maintain a list of the last 10 items of food eaten
2- if you eat a food, modify enjoyability and nutrition value by 50% - (occurences in list of food item *10)%

Basically, if you haven’t had that particular food item in the last 10 times you ate anything you gain 50% bonus to nutrition and enjoyability. If you’ve had nothing but that you’d get a 50% penalty.

If you alternate between two food types, you’re getting more or less the standard value for each.
If you bother to go all chef like, you can give yourself a pretty good boost.

[Inadequate]

I could see modifying enjoy ability, but nutrition seems to be a pretty weird thing to modify. No matter how much you’ve been eating of something, it’s still going to be exactly as nutritious as it ever was.

[Heruedhel]

Yeah, I thought about that. But I think that eating the same thing over and over again would leave your body lacking in certain nutrients, and this reflects that. The nutrient system (vitamins, carbs, proteins…etc) suggested earlier reflects that much better, but I just want something simple and non-intrusive that encourages players to add more flavour to their diet.

Thematically speaking, the more you eat something, the less your body will be excited about processing it (chewing, digesting…etc). My brother is a body builder. He put himself on a junk protein rich diet until his body decided to veto him. He eventually started throwing up every time he had hot dogs or canned Tuna until he reverted to a more balanced diet. This is the kind of thing I want to reflect with the nutrition penalty.

[JanBlair]

Or we could just have a similar design to what General Patton mentioned.

[Inadequate]

I’ve always thought the main reason why players go for meat was because it’s easily replenishable and easily preserved. I think if you really wanted to encourage players to try out other food, the best thing to do would be to add in more ways to store and grow other food products, rather than protesting when they go for the obviously superior choice. I know I’ve harped on it a bit, but farming really would be a good way to solve quite a lot of these issues. If you had a steady source of fresh milk and eggs, plus a way to preserve fruits and veggies easily, there’d be less focus on a meat-centric diet. Less about punishing the player and more about making other options more attractive.

Unreal World also does the nutrition system in addition to hunger. The funny thing is that meat is the most nutritious food there, so if you can afford to go on an all-meat diet there’s no reason not to.

Regardless, anything that involves nerfing meat should probably look at revamping wild veggies and making them more useful, otherwise it’s just hurting the player experience for no particular reason.

[JanBlair]

Except in Unreal World you play as a Finnish character of ancient times in which the diet is primarily meat, usually wild meat from squirrels and other woodland animals. However in modern times our diet includes all of the different food groups to add to the nutrition. Eating like an ancient Finnish man is probably not a good idea. You will suffer digestive problems. Not to mention the wild animals. I also think we should add fishing into the game. Farming needs to be expanded. We should rebalance the nutrition system to all food (not just meat). And as for carnivore characters, their nutrition requirements would be different.