AtoB wrote:It's better that only robots can iterate through all combinations, so finding the overpowered item of the day is kept to a small group.
There are lots of VERY good foods that aren't on the public cookbooks, and the public cookbooks have no good way of parsing the data they're given so they've been vandalized a lot.
Considering how much effort has been put into holding sperglord autists back in the name of keeping stats somewhat balanced, it's hilarious that on the lower end it's unrealistic for most players to even know what foods they're supposed to make. Every time I raid some guy who clearly plays a lot, probably more than me, but I outstat 10:1 I feel bad when I see his cupboards full of worthless garbage food. So much time wasted that if he knew how to spend properly maybe he wouldn't have gotten dunked with no chance to win at all, and maybe I would have a fun rivalry instead of an ant to squash.
Moreover, how the fuck does Jorbtar intend to balance literally hundreds of thousands/millions/tens of millions of recipes? Even a few outliers break the entire system, in fact fewer outliers just make those outliers more powerful because fewer people will have access to them. For the majority of the playerbase feasting is directly or indirectly either a majority of, or a significant portion of their time spent playing the game. There should be an intended set of foods to eat. Foods that are fun to make, hard to bot, or create trade. This is one of the worst places for RNG to decide gameplay.
When smoked sausages were meta for 5 minutes before whales ruined it, I spent so much time outside my walls just boating around hunting and having fun. I don't even rly think it was the most effective use of my time, but it was close enough and more enjoyable. Balancing food around that kind of activity would probably make the world feel more alive than most of your other attempts at getting people to leave their walls.