Nutritional balancing

Game Talk The Bunker
41

Both of User and Chezzo: You need to drop this. This is about how we should balance nutritional needs for C:DDA, not your personal space to pick at one another like scabs.

Chezzo: you should focus less on backing up your facts about this learned/unlearned/rice?? tangent, and focus on how we can improve nutrition’s gameplay value. Using reality as a starting point is great, sure, but adhering to the particulars and debating them to the exclusion of the original thread purpose is only going to lead to everyone’s frustration.

User: you should likewise focus on helping review these facts, and linking your own sources to nutritional data. Linking sources to types of personal attacks is not remotely relevant to nutrition. Insulting another user’s attempt to provide data and accusing them of trolling is unhelpful. Reporting someone uninvolved for shitposting while you’re in an active, pedantic, argument is not the best use of the report button.

I’m not here to fact-check your goddamn essay citation page, I’m here to discourage derails and kick spambots. I’m a moderator, not a college prof.

Both sides: Please take some time to step back, read over the first page of this thread, and consider how you two can collaborate to come up with some ideas to improve C:DDA’s nutrition system. The game needs more understandable warnings, and better balancing of available food’s nutritional values. It needs to be better tailored for the odd timescale/pace the game works within.

For bystanders to derails (such as SpadeDraco and Treah) posting non-contributing sass or stepping into the derail fray only further obscures the original thread’s direction. In the future, it is generally better to ignore a derail and help push the topic back toward being constructive.

42

Back on topic: is osteoporosis even in the game? I am aware of calcium deficiency from the forums here but have yet to experience it ingame (i die too soon). What is calcium used for besides bone-building. Tooth health? Are there other negative consequences that might arise from a lack of certain nutrients that are shorter-term than the ones included ingame currently?

My thought process behind this is of considering short-term nutritional complications, and long-term ones. Issues for players like me who don’t make it through their first two days, and issues that tend to arise only for players who make it to the hundreds-days benchmark. this might be a decent simplification that covers two different player types, and could give reason to keep problems like osteoporosis ingame despite the incredibly slow onset. Yes, it would be setting in after a couple ‘years’ instead of decades, but i think !!fun!! should come ahead of realism on that particular detail.

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You guys ought to either bin the whole thing, or simplify it, because nutirtional science is actually in turmoil right now. -No one- knows -anything- for sure.

You can go a lifetime with extremely tiny and very infrequent doses of vitamin C only if your diet consists of little to no carbohydrates. Weeeeee!

I hope you guys aren’t planning on implementing Ketosis and Ketoacidosis.

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Thing about what your goal is mechanically, rather than trying to simulate life.

Is it to make the player come up with a variety of food sources, so they can’t just rely on meat, or 8 tonnes of flour?

Because if not, then we have to consider the insulin cycle and how bodies adapt to different diets. Like,t his might blow your mind, there are multiple optimal diets, but if you try to do half and half of two of them, you create a terrible diet.

ex. mixing a ketogenic diet with a vegetarian diet

Ketogenic diets are healthy because they primarily metabolize fat, rather than gearing to metabolize large quantities of carbohydrates. These are diets with extremely high fat content and extremely low carb content, in order to stay under a threshhold that keeps the liver in a ketogenic state.

Basically, speaking in laymans terms here, when there isn’t insulin in your blood, you are in a ketogenic state. When you eat carbs, your body releases insulin to process it. While there is insulin in your blood, you cannot process fat for fuel, only carbs. Which is why a diet high in carbs and high in fat is terrible for you, but a diet low in carbs and high in fat is fantastic for you. Above your bodies carb threshold, your fat intake gets stored hastily, like in your veins, and in the viscera. Below it, it gets metabolized as slow burning energy. Not only what you intake, but what you have stored (including what’s in your blood)

that’s the whole point though. That’s intentional (As intentional as natural selection can be). You store fat when you eat carbs because carbs burn fast and usually are not in abundance. If you have an abundance of carbs, then you are not in famine, and therefore, it’s time to store FOR a famine. If you don’t have an abundance of carbs, it is time to switch gears to burning fat, because you are now in a famine.

Now with all this… does this belong in the game? Fuck no.

Stop being pedants.

The intention of the mechanic is to create difficulty in stockpiling food sources by forcing players to require a variety of foods. You cannot properly simulate nutrition without getting granular as fuck with the simulation… and I really dont want to see a ‘Blood Sugar Analysis CBM’ in the game.

45

There was a great mod in minecraft that basically decreased the nutirtional effectiveness of a food the more often you ate it, with a slow cool down.

So if you ate a steak, it’d be at 100%. Eat two and it’s at 85%. Three? 60%… etc etc

Okay, so it’s getting less effective, now you should eat say… a salad. That’s at 100%. Eat another and it’s even smaller… Eventually the meat effectiveness starts climbing back up to 100%

So it’s not about simulating nutrition, it’s about requiring variety.

K.I.S.S

46

Honestly, a few months back, there was a mention of having morale bonuses/penalties related to food variety. I still feel this would be a decent way to go, if the idea is to encourage players to keep some variety around.

Something as simple as “Craving meat -XX” in the morale window if you haven’t eaten meat in a while. Not disease effects or anything, just a simple “Your character is pretty depressed because all you’ve been eating is plain bread”. The player is then highly encouraged to try and have at least some of each of the food groups around. Could even tie it into the Gourmand trait, maybe they are less affected by cravings since they love all food so much. A meat sandwich over just eating straight bread would satisfy desires for breads and meat. Deluxe one would also help with a veggie craving. A dairy craving would make powdered milks and condensed milks much luckier finds. Farming players would have incentive to grow varied crops, and to hunt while they are out. You’d ultimately still see some recipes be more “Optimal” than others based on their ingredients, but it’d give me a reason to make more than hardtack and dehydrated fruit flakes.

Then you could balance the exact effects, onset timers, and so forth, based on actual game play concerns as opposed to “Well how long does it take for iron deficiency to kick in in real life”. Players could have the option of spending points on perks like Gourmand to make it better, or an opposite of Gourmand to make it worse. Being able to balance it mechanically, as opposed to realistically, should help a great deal.

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I have always found the morale window to be highly communicative, if largely related to how much porn and pain my survivor has consumed lately.

I would very much like the main goal of a nutrition system to be that of encouraging variety. I’ve already said it, but why have like forty food options on the menu when I’ll only ever use two at any one point in my survivor’s progress toward sustainability?

Personal secondary goal: I always thought diseases were an interesting means of inflicting temporary playstyle changes, in ways that traits and flaws do - just not voluntary. They force me to engage with the game world in a different fashion than construction or combat, because of this. If nutrition is going to be included, it seems a good source of a couple new diseases. Not like, one-for-every-vitamin, just two or three tops. It’s a bit weird when it’s almost always parasites and food poisoning I’m getting.

I wouldn’t want them included in a way that made them frustrating upkeep work - more like, …well, like “don’t-drink-dirty-water”. Sometimes you have to resort to it out of desperation. Maybe somedays I just have to go without a particular food facet that I get some kind of deprivation - I’ll just have to live with it, or figure out how to venture into the woods where spiders keep their eggs, and risk potential bear maulings. Negative statuses are more interesting when they push more risk-versus-reward behaviour out of the player, rather than cripple them too severely.

Should there be penalties for overdoing it on certain food groups/food facets? Personally, I don’t think so. Not unless it’s something like when you over-eat and your guy throws up. Nothing overly dangerous, just wasteful. And you really have to go out of your way to overdo it. Maybe you eat far, far too many carbs and get tired temporarily. food coma. Haha. The mark of a successful survivor!

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Honestly, a few months back, there was a mention of having morale bonuses/penalties related to food variety.
yes, this is what chezzo and me have been talking about but he says this shouldn't be the case, citing fast food and cake studies. you are talking about [url=http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=13234.msg285874#msg285874]this post[/url] and those after it. i linked to it and you would know that if you had enough respect for others to read a thread before posting in it.

I also said:

the problem with balancing some generic food like "wild vegetables" is that when your body needs a vitamin you'll automatically eat more of those plants that provide it so it would have to be dynamically adjusted :-/ there is also some food that lets you make better use of certain kinds of vitamin in other food, so the whole system should just be more relaxed to compensate for our inability to simulate the efficiency brought about by millions of years of evolution.

though all of this has been said before, but it appears nobody can be arsed to implement it?

49

I’d like you both to address my idea.

50

The bonuses and penalties to food variety would be driven by a person getting bored of eating the same thing all the time, rather than any nutritional requirements I thought? That would allow the system to make sense, without having to rely on non-unanimous medical journals for data. Subhazard’s comparison to Minecraft’s diminishing-returns model would be a good approach to preference-based food morale, I think.

edited to remove content that has since been resolved.

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Let me see if I can find the mod for you. It uses the minecraft hunger system, so ignore ‘satiety’ as a mechanic, we’ve already got something else.

I recommend playing around with it yourself to get a good idea for it. I imagine most of you probably already play FTB

http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-mods/2091809-the-spice-of-life-encouraging-dietary-variety

Here we go.

edited by Pthalocy to consolidate a post.

52

The penalty from overdoing one food group would be the increasing morale penalties from the groups your neglecting. There’s no need for an additional “Too much bread” morale penalty, its already implied by your cravings from the other things. Otherwise, your adding additional punishment to players who are genuinely in a situation where all they’ve gotten is canned pumpkin and beans.

As for diseases, I’ve never found them as clear or easily understood as the morale menu. Morale is press a key, get a list of whats going on, to what strength it is happening, and a summary at the bottom. Quick and concise. Diseases are tucked away in a sub-tab of the @ menu, which isn’t immediately intuitive (I spent half a year playing before I even realized I could tab around it, I didn’t realize it was an interactive menu), and when you do make your way to the disease, it tells you the name, and the effect. Some are obvious “I have a bite on my arm? Must have gotten it in a fight” but aren’t immediately obvious about their future dangers (“The bite wound hurts. Well, I should take a painkiller” - Novice me, not knowing infection mechanics) or how to properly care for them. I guess that’s a personal gripe though. Disease style effects could be good if used sparingly.

Really, what I don’t want to do is end up over doing the punishments for the system. We’ve already got dangers of overeating, adding additional penalties to something we generally don’t do won’t make much of a difference. We’d already be punishing their ability to craft and learn and work with the morale penalty. Diseases are a general stat malus, or other active effect. If we are going to tell a player “You need to go exploring and fight to find the stuff your craving, because all you’ve eaten is bread” do we also want to say “But do it with a few less stat points, or a speed penalty”? Doesn’t seem good to me. Late game characters just won’t care if they go from strength 13 to 12 because they’ve got the skills to compensate, early game characters will be punished even worse because they don’t.

Whoop, while I was writing that, a bunch of things popped up.

[quote=“User, post:48, topic:12197”]

Honestly, a few months back, there was a mention of having morale bonuses/penalties related to food variety.

yes, this is what chezzo and me have been talking about but he says this shouldn’t be the case, citing fast food and cake studies.
you are talking about this post and those after it.
i linked to it and you would know that if you had enough respect for others to read a thread before posting in it.[/quote]

For some reason I remembered it having been said by Coolthulhu. Sorry, I checked outta the argument between you and Chezzo once the insults started flying. But none of you mentioned morale penalties. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough, I’m talking about removing the vitamin system entirely, and replacing it with a cravings system. Like, not actually caring about vitamins, but caring about those general cravings people get. Not a “I’m craving meat because I need protein” thing. A “I’m craving meat because I like steak and its been a while” type system.

I’m not a fan of it. It punishes players for eating too much of the same food, but it punishes them by meaning they need to eat more of it to not be starving. The “nutrition” stat food has now basically acts as fullness, or a calorie counter. Minecraft gets away with it because its not pretending to be realistic in the slightest, but Cata is somewhat trying. Feels too far off the mark, and introduces a few weird cases of “game logic” that isn’t immediately intuitive to a player.

53
I'm not a fan of it. It punishes players for eating too much of the same food, but it punishes them by meaning they need to eat more of it to not be starving. The "nutrition" stat food has now basically acts as fullness, or a calorie counter. Minecraft gets away with it because its not pretending to be realistic in the slightest, but Cata is somewhat trying. Feels too far off the mark, and introduces a few weird cases of "game logic" that isn't immediately intuitive to a player.

Thanks for taking the time, and I appreciate you laying out your thoughts.

I suppose it comes down to really defining CDDA’s design philosophy. Where’s the verdict on ‘Simulation’ vs ‘Game’ or ‘Realism’ vs ‘Authenticity’

Is it more important that it FEELS like real life, or is it more important that it IS like real life.

I will agree that my solution could be too simple. However, it’s a good baseline and alternative to continue discussion from.

I think, before we keep going, we should figure out where CDDA stands on the above mentioned aspects.

Are we intending to be more simulation than game, or more game than simulation? To what degree?

Are we intending to be realistic (accurately simulating, to the best of our abilities, the mechanics of real life), or authenticity (approximating the mechanics of real life to create the feelings that one should experience)

once we define these things, we can discuss the rest of the game much more easily. Otherwise, this discussion would get incredibly circular, and we won’t get anywhere.

Summary:

Define the design paradigm.

54
checked outta the argument between you and Chezzo once the insults started flying. But none of you mentioned morale penalties
It's in [url=http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=13234.msg285874#msg285874]this or one of its following posts[/url], you might have missed the link to it. Anyway, in real life the morale penalty is the result of your unhealthy monotonous diet (and evolution) so which one you implement in cataclysm doesn't really matter. It's still based on the same real life effect, unless fall for the fast food fallacy. There could also an immediate morale penalty (or boost) and a long-term (months and years) health effect.

In case you’re still not clicking on the link i keep linking:
There could also be no penalties at all and a morale boost for eating varied food.

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User has been temporarily banned for intentional incendiary behaviour, as listed under Here

If anyone wishes to discuss this further, please PM me instead of posting it publicly.

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Quoting from the design document on the lab subforum

Reality-based: At its core, DDA is based in the real world. One that has been changed in extreme ways, but still very much the real world as we know it. The things in the game that exist in the real world should act like their real-world counterparts; things that are extrapolated from real-world things should hold true to the real-world principles involved, and things that do not exist in the real world are free to act in whatever internally consistent way they want. This includes things like population density, item stats, item spawn frequencies. It’s a simulation, so there are of course limits to the verisimilitude, and in fact it’s generally not a very good simulation at all, but the *goal* is to depict reality.

The last line implies to me that we are aiming for something that approximates the experience we would expect in real life, without having to go crazy. More simulation than game, but with an emphasis on gameplay. How far your willing to bend the simulation in favor of gameplay is going to be a personal preference.

The whole document is located at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LhNpXGXmkPOxp_cp0-c9G7xqnihwApq-eZSa99exfcU/edit?pli=1 If you want to check it out. Its a bit old from what I can tell, but it seems to hold true regardless.

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[quote=“Profugo Barbatus, post:56, topic:12197”]Quoting from the design document on the lab subforum

Reality-based: At its core, DDA is based in the real world. One that has been changed in extreme ways, but still very much the real world as we know it. The things in the game that exist in the real world should act like their real-world counterparts; things that are extrapolated from real-world things should hold true to the real-world principles involved, and things that do not exist in the real world are free to act in whatever internally consistent way they want. This includes things like population density, item stats, item spawn frequencies. It’s a simulation, so there are of course limits to the verisimilitude, and in fact it’s generally not a very good simulation at all, but the *goal* is to depict reality.

The last line implies to me that we are aiming for something that approximates the experience we would expect in real life, without having to go crazy. More simulation than game, but with an emphasis on gameplay. How far your willing to bend the simulation in favor of gameplay is going to be a personal preference.

The whole document is located at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LhNpXGXmkPOxp_cp0-c9G7xqnihwApq-eZSa99exfcU/edit?pli=1 If you want to check it out. Its a bit old from what I can tell, but it seems to hold true regardless.[/quote]

In that case, I think the current design should be kept, and then an additional, simplified option should be available as a mod.

As it comes down to personal preference, having multiple systems available to the player I think would be the best option.

So rather than deciding which system is best, create alternative systems that the player can selection upon world creation.

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[quote=“Phallacy”]

In that case, I think the current design should be kept, and then an additional, simplified option should be available as a mod.

As it comes down to personal preference, having multiple systems available to the player I think would be the best option.

So rather than deciding which system is best, create alternative systems that the player can selection upon world creation.


Well, the current system would be acceptable if it worked on a realistic timescale and if more calcium sources could be found or veggies had higher calcium.
Two thirds of mankind can’t drink milk and still have alright bones without drinking bone broth all the time.[/quote]

Okay, then let’s just adjust those numbers then.

I don’t see why it needs a discussion.

edited for housekeeping.

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http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?board=3.0

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Guys, stop replying to the guy actively evading a mod ban. You’ll only encourage him.