To be honest, the morale boost from food is much too weak. Not that its not large enough, no, Gourmand takes care of that - but rather that the morale you get from eating a variety of delicious meals is very, very short lived. Having a hearty meal should satisfy a person for at least a couple of hours, not just a few minutes. I can understand why this is the case with drugs like cocaine and meth since those are short lived but very powerful highs, but eating a hearty meal can give you a boost to help throughout the entire day almost. Hence the old stereotype of lumberjacks and steak-and-egg breakfasts.
As it currently stands, there really is no point to eating a wide variety of food. The morale boost without Gourmand is negligible and it goes away almost instantly. My survivor might as well eat nothing but bread and water and there would be absolutely zero noticeable difference than if they were the most luxuriously fed of all survivors. Perhaps this should be changed? I suggest reducing the bonus to morale Gourmand gives, while making the time morale from food gives last x4 times as long before going away. Because food, especially in dire circumstances like those found in Cataclysm, can be extremely important to the morale and well being of people. Hell, just ask any soldier thats been deployed how important good food is. Why do you think humans spend so much time and energy preparing food, learning recipes, getting just the right ingredients, going back for as long as man has known how to make fire? Because we love food, we’re biologically hardwired to find eating food as being one of the most pleasurable experiences in life. Hell there’s even debate among anthropologists that says early man might have invented agriculture just to get grain for making alcohol.
Speaking of alcohol…There’s something very wrong with alcohol in Cata, at least in the form of addiction. It is way, way, WAY too easy to get addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, and other every-other-day type drugs. But alcohol especially. I know that alcohol and cigarettes can be very addictive in real life, but seriously, addictions to those types of things take months if not SEVERAL YEARS to develop. In cataclysm, you just drink 4 shots of vodka back to back and all of a sudden the next day your log is filled with "YOU NEED A DRINK, BAD!!"
You don’t get addicted to alcohol by just drinking 1/5th of a bottle of vodka in one sitting, I mean seriously its ridiculous. Addictions in general need to also be reworked to be more time-oriented rather than satiation-oriented. Because of how addiction is calculated, you can go from completely sober to life-time alcoholic in only a few hours by just downing an entire bottle of whiskey in a single sitting. The same is true for all drugs, like having to take 5 doses of Tromadol because its the only painkiller you have, and the next day getting hit in the face by an addiction so strong that its like you’ve been a heroin junkie for 10 years straight and now have to go clean. Addictions take a lot of time to develop, even addictions to hard drugs.
Honestly addictions have been longing for a rework for a long time. As you mentioned it’s way too easy to get addicted to some things, but we also have several addictions that have penalties that are way too small as is. The solution for an addiction in-game shouldn’t just automatically default to “bit a penalty for a few days and cold turkey stop using”. There’s a reason why we tend to wean people off drugs instead of cold turkey’ing them in real life, and some of that definitely needs to be expressed in the use.
Similarly the current morale+focus is one of those things that right now could use a bit of a tweak to bring it to a bit more of a realistic, long-term, system.
[quote=“i2amroy, post:2, topic:10186”]Honestly addictions have been longing for a rework for a long time. As you mentioned it’s way too easy to get addicted to some things, but we also have several addictions that have penalties that are way too small as is. The solution for an addiction in-game shouldn’t just automatically default to “bit a penalty for a few days and cold turkey stop using”. There’s a reason why we tend to wean people off drugs instead of cold turkey’ing them in real life, and some of that definitely needs to be expressed in the use.
Similarly the current morale+focus is one of those things that right now could use a bit of a tweak to bring it to a bit more of a realistic, long-term, system.[/quote]
Really, time is the problem here. Gaining and losing addictions just happen too fast. Addictions take a long time to develop, but also a long time to get rid of. I’m not sure if this would be possible to code, but I suggest adding into the game a “record” of how much the player uses certain drugs, and then calculating addiction from there. Like, every time the player partakes in a drug that can potentially cause addiction, the amount consumed throughout that day is recoded to a save file, and every day there’s a check (with some RNG thrown in) that looks at the pattern/amount of consumption throughout the player’s life, and sets an addiction level based on how chronic and regularly said drug is consumed. For instance, developing a noticeable alcohol addiction might require the player drinking 3+ shots or more of alcohol for roughly 7 in-game days straight, or 2 shots a day for 14 days straight, 1 shot a day for 21 days straight, etc etc.
Satiation checks should generally be capped at 3+ doses per day, though. An in-game week is probably the minimum amount of time it should take to develop an addiction to anything except for hard drugs like heroin. In other words, you can get away with binging on an entire bottle of whiskey, just dont do it 3 or 4 times.
The method of keeping a “Record” is pretty much literally what the current set of code does, it’s just really badly balanced and aimed remarkably at the short term rather than the long one.
Meth is not nearly as short lived as it is in game. The high from meth lasts up to sixteen hours, it is not a rush for five minutes followed immediately by a crash like smoking crack. [1]
You are absolutely right about alcohol, but nicotine is a very very addictive drug, and cigarettes (at least all major American brands, what you’d find in people’s cars in New England) are made even more addictive with the use of additives and the other compounds in tobacco. [2][3]
I say as I puff away on my vape pen, but hey at least I’m not tarring up my lungs or burning my house down again.
This graphic here shows it all:
Nicotine is the most horrible drug in the world, it gives you no pleasure other than the scratching of it’s own itch. It is not a nootropic like it is in CDDA. Heroin is awesome, at taking away pain especially, and makes you have the worst flu ever if you ever even think about quitting her. Tramadol, though, you have to eat handfuls and handfuls every half hour for months to build up any sort of addiction. I think the addiction level of 6 though (Cannabis is 5) reflects this.
