Food balance

[Onionfighter]

From the recent cheese thread viewtopic.php?f=5&t=15478:

Perhaps if "food diversity" were a stat itself, almost like the oft-ridiculed "happiness" meter?

Perhaps there could be a "food balance" meter. On either side could be herbivore and carnivore. In the middle, would be omnivore, which would be the desired position. Eating too much meat/cheese would move you toward carnivore which at extreme levels would lead to vitamin deficiencies which would cause you to take more shp damage than normal. Eating just vegetables or grains would bias you toward herbivore, which at extreme levels would cause you to lose stamina more quickly (hunger would increase more slowly though, so this isn't useful for gaining feps).
Some foods, of course, would be naturally balanced (or at least less biased than others), like the chicken salad.

[Sarge]

I don't think I like it. I don't see any benefits to this, it just makes eating even more of a pita.

[SpidersEverywhere]

mmm, pita

[Kaldo]

I think that the current system already takes too much fun out of eating... And thanks to it I have like, two cupboards of fox and boar meat which I cannot eat unless I want to make it much more difficult to raise other stats later. I'd prefer that there are less calculations or at least that every stat has it's own bar. That would mean that it would be much more useful combining different foods (that nobody eats atm) because you wouldn't risk getting a stat that you already raised, and it would reduce the amount of food that you have to eat to fill up that particular stat bar.

[Zirikana]

another solution to the "problem" might be to simply abolish all pure-FEP foods, and have everything be a blend of two or more types.

(Not saying I support this idea necessarily, just throwing it out there for discussion)

[Potjeh]

Like I said in the other thread, I'd prefer a diversity bonus that works across multiple FEP bars. Possible implementation:

Game remembers when you last ate a specific food type. Then your bar is reduced by 5/(x+1) % for each food type you've eaten, where x is the number of food events that passed since you last ate that item type. Multiple bonuses work like the current FEP reduction, ie each consecutive bonus operates on the bar reduced by the previous bonus rather than the base bar, and the best bonuses are applied first.

[ImpalerWrG]

Wouldn't that require a potentially huge amount of data to to stored, basically a counter for every single food item? That could be prohibitive if player created food recipes ever gets implemented.

How about just tracking the last X items eaten ware X is highest stat or maybe the square root of the highest stat rounded down if we want to keep the range smaller. The total number of unique types within that list can be counted out each time you eat something and from that the amount of Diversity bonus determined by some kind of compounding similar to the current diversity bonus. It could even be it's own bar so the player can see for example that they have 38 of 57 diversity and that is giving "78.8% Bonus" or something to that effect.

[Potjeh]

It would require tracking one timestamp per food type, not really that demanding.

[Thurrok]

Idea is meeeeeh. Balancing food feps, OK. Making eating less tiresome clickfests, I'm for it! Not this one though.

Maybe if it came bundled with a wursting overhaul... may-bee.

[ImpalerWrG]

It would require tracking one timestamp per food type, not really that demanding.

Not presently when food types are <100 and counters of 1 byte each, I'm just wondering what the final number of food types is going to be and if that could become a burden.

In any case I think tracking last X objects is simpler for the player to grasp, I think the only flaw with Zirkana's initial suggestion (in the other thread) was having a fixed count for number of items tracked, he sited 3 in his example which would be ok for a brand new character but would need to expand as the player gets access to more food types, square root of highest stat seems reasonable to me.