Food reform

[Night2o1]

Right.. I'm also just throwing out ideas on how to get around accidentally nerfing chunk-using abilities while making permafood more important. More inedible chunks (ie: a corpse would have a symbol that meant "inedible" but the corpse would still be there in the first place, and you could still cut chunks out for abilities if that was relevant to your character). My argument is that reducing chunk satiation would be annoying, as anyone trying to play the food minigame effectively would have to butcher and eat more frequently. Which is tedious.

But it might be annoying in itself to be hungry, see a goblin corpse drop, run up and realize that it is inedible instead of automatically knowing you can cut food from it. The main benefit I see in my idea is that you don't have to go through every chunk/corpse-using ability and re-tweak them to make them work adequately as you would if corpse and chunk drops were just reduced across the board.

[dpeg]

I really like Grimm's proposal for making satiation at Full or better mean something. The obvious candidate would be additional regeneration (obvious because Trolls can stuff themselves and have good regeneration already). It would also make Gourmand more useful. There are counterpoints, so that is nothing for 0.10.

Less nutrition from chunks is definitely not the solution. As galehar says, we can ponder reducing chunks per corpse. The food reform was radical with it (halving the ration), and I liked the results (but then, I didn't play food-challenged species). Since 0.10 has the Hive cut, I'd suggest we wait. We can afford to slowly reduce the chunks/corpse value until we're satisified.

[galehar]

no additional corpse type guys, let's keep it simple. How about we try to focus on making the brown penalty more relevant without being too annoying? That's why I suggested the "nauseous effect". If it makes you eat less, then it's actually less tedious. Then we can adjust the nutrition penalty and the nauseous duration and make them depend on mutation level.

[Night2o1]

Makes a lot of sense IMO, shows my inexperience in considering game design problems

I must of missed your suggestion for that.. I assume nauseous effect would do something like give some combat penalty for several hundred turns? I really like it if so..

btw I kind of like these types of discussions, is there a place where individuals such as myself can lend their support to ideas or more be more directly involved in the discussion whilst not actually being a programmer outside of this forum? just curious..otherwise I'm going to have to learn how to code, quite the endeavor I suspect

[ryak]

I really like Grimm's proposal for making satiation at Full or better mean something. The obvious candidate would be additional regeneration (obvious because Trolls can stuff themselves and have good regeneration already). It would also make Gourmand more useful. There are counterpoints, so that is nothing for 0.10.

Less nutrition from chunks is definitely not the solution. As galehar says, we can ponder reducing chunks per corpse. The food reform was radical with it (halving the ration), and I liked the results (but then, I didn't play food-challenged species). Since 0.10 has the Hive cut, I'd suggest we wait. We can afford to slowly reduce the chunks/corpse value until we're satisified.

Even with the Hive cut, i think the food game can easily afford reduced chunk drops. Remember the formula is d(max_chunks) + 1, so the reduction to actual number of chunks dropped is not linear with reductions to max_chunks. And honestly the current number is clearly too much. If half is too drastic, we could easily reduce it by 1.5x to avoid overshooting.

[galehar]

Nausea sounds like a good way to make people starve, which would be pretty annoying. (You eat a chunk, it gives you nausea, you go berserk...well, now you're starving and you can't eat anything because of the nausea, and are screwed no matter how much permafood you have.)

What if nausea prevents you from eating unless you're starving?

[galehar]

Even with the Hive cut, i think the food game can easily afford reduced chunk drops. Remember the formula is d(max_chunks) + 1, so the reduction to actual number of chunks dropped is not linear with reductions to max_chunks.

Actually, the formula is 1 + random2(max_chunks) which is the same as 1d(max_chunks). I think the reduction in average chunk is linear with max_chunks reduction.

[vintermann]

I'm not surprised people dislike the multiple tresholds, but I suspect that it is because they insist on trying to do something (squeezing the most out of their permafood from eating low-quality chunks) that isn't supposed to be worth it anymore. The way the reform has failed, is that it hasn't convinced them to eat that permafood instead, so they're subjecting themselves to stress continuously which I really only wanted a player to face when they were actually low on food.

I disagree. You can't say that the system failed because the players played it wrong. Losing the food minigame means starving to death, you can't expect the player to do anything but try to play it optimally. And it means saving permafood whenever possible. Under your system, the way to do it was to be at the lowest possible satiation threshold to be able to eat the worst possible food.

The food minigame is not merely about not starving. Casters and berserkers (and, to a lesser degree anyone who uses a hunger-causing effect) have reason to stay at safe levels of satiation, and I'd wager they die a lot more from holding back on the hunger-causing specials than from starvation. Players try to play it optimally, but I think they're doing it wrong even today.

In the present system, I typically dip into permafood at very hungry if I'm feeling reasonably safe, and pre-eat if I'm feeling vulnerable and have a hunger-causing lifesaver. I have yet to starve (except from hunger/anger mutation).

[vintermann]

What if nausea prevents you from eating unless you're starving?

Then you're back where you were, incentivizing people to hover over starving (stupid as it is).

Nausea should only prevent chunk eating (and possibly meat ration eating for herbivores), and you should consider calling it indigestion.

[dpeg]

I support Nausea (no eating) over Sickness (no regeneration) as a brown chunk effect for two reasons:
(a) It is more convenient. With Sickness, you're either smart enough to rest up first and eat afterwards or, being not as smart or simply too hungry, you eat, hope for the best and wait off the Sickness. With Nausea, you just rest up after the battle and since you got your nutrition just fine (change to brown chunks already in trunk), you can resume your game.
(b) It is more relevant. No regeneration is only relevant in tactical situations. I'd wager that it should only affects players because they were too greedy with permafood. If you're on a dangerous, unexplored level (being shafted, say), you should really dip into permafood. On the other hand, no eating is a less short term concern. Depending on how low on food you are, whether you use satiation reducing effects (rage, spells) and the absence/presence of healing/heal wounds potions, you may want to shun brown chunks at low satiation for principal reasons (as opposed greediness with no regeneration).

Analysis: Yes, some players would actually starve. But that's what a food clock is for, isn't it? The crucial point is that it completely in the player's hands to not starve (this comment will incite the stories about "no permafood, only brown chunks found on D:1-10 -- but that is as bad with the change or without).
I like that it affects casters and ragers more than anyone else.

Vintermann: If we go the no-eating way, we should go it to the end. Nausea is not a death spell, since you can use healing/heal wounds to get rid of it. In other words, I am definitely against eating at starving (as you are) but also against eating permafood when nauseous.

Been thinking some more about positive effects for Full or better. Perhaps instead of regeneration (which already comes with a spell and several items), it could increase MP regeneration. This is only useful for casters, who have an interesting food minigame anyway. Also, it will help the currently buffed amulet of guardian spirit.

[Galefury]

I think eating permafood should be allowed when nauseous, but with severely reduced nutrition value (think 10% of regular nutrition, cant keep most of it down). This offers players another resource-intensive way to not starve if they don't have healing potions, or don't want to spend them on curing nausea.

And I don't think the purpose of the food clock is to make players starve. The point is to keep them moving by introducing a strategic resource that constantly needs to be replenished.

[dpeg]

I didn't that players should starve left and right. But currently "food clock" is a threat without teeth. If we introduce the harsher Nausea rule, it will actually make more impact.

It is also better for gameplay: I'd rather be forced to spend the meat ration in advance than the game caving in into my greediness by allowing me to eat the ration afterwards (when nauseous) for 10% nutrition.

[njvack]

But currently "food clock" is a threat without teeth.

Well... I see this as partially true. In the hundreds of games I've played, I have never starved. In every non-mummy game I've played, though, the food clock has kept me moving and put a brake on big spells and berserk. It's pushed me into doing reckless things in search of food. This mostly ends once I clear Hive, but that's ending anyhow.

Of course, maybe this is because I'm not very good at Crawl -- but I think that in my case, the 0.9 food system (until Hive) works as intended. I'd much rather have a system where I never starve, but am always a little worried that I might.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Even after finding the Hive, while I'm almost never under the threat of starvation, the food clock still keeps me from hanging around and wasting time. I have to keep going because, while I may have a lot of food, I don't have unlimited food. Especially if I'm going to try to tackle the extended end-game.

I'd support being able to eat something when starving, even if you're nauseated. I mean, heck, you're starving to death, I don't think you'd care if you're filling a little sick and uneasy, people have been known to eat unmentionable things to stave off starvation. And from a gameplay standpoint, it'd really suck to starve to death because you were nauseated because you ate a brown chunk, got sick, and then a hungry ghost ambushed you, you catch/already have berserkitis and it went off, or you casted a high hunger spell to survive a directly fatal situation all because that Orc Wizard thought it'd be funny to do two damage to you with puffs of frost and shattered your healing potions.

Alternatively, an effect of being nauseated, instead of preventing eating, could be to (maybe greatly) accelerate the food clock until it wore off, even if you had fast metabolism 3. It'd have more or less the same effect on the food clock and would force you to dip into perma-food more often without risking some of the less-common-but-sure-to-happen-since-this-is-Crawl situations I mentioned above.

[galehar]

The crucial point is that it completely in the player's hands to not starve

Yes, you're right. All the examples given in this page are completely avoidable. You do get some nutrition from the brown chunk, if you waste by going berserk, then you had it coming.

[KoboldLord]

Even after finding the Hive, while I'm almost never under the threat of starvation, the food clock still keeps me from hanging around and wasting time. I have to keep going because, while I may have a lot of food, I don't have unlimited food. Especially if I'm going to try to tackle the extended end-game.

In the post-game material, the food clock actually gets less effective for normal characters because going through Pan will loot enough food rations as treasure to cause a net increase in food availability. You pretty much have to play a troll or ogre or something to feel any pressure at all, and even then you can always go Kiku or Jiyva, or skill up to Necromutation.

I find that the main clock that keeps me from wasting time for almost the entire game is the piety clock. Most deities have piety scores that decay over time, and if I spend too much time fooling around with my stash or trying to mess with something that isn't yet worthwhile, I run the risk of losing some of my best powers, albeit temporarily.

[dpeg]

The crucial point is that it completely in the player's hands to not starve

Yes, you're right. All the examples given in this page are completely avoidable. You do get some nutrition from the brown chunk, if you waste by going berserk, then you had it coming.

Just like how you had it coming if you pressed the arrow key that would move you into lava, right?

I filed you under 'good player with often reasonable sometimes strong opinions' but this is pushing it.
What are the similarities between an instadeath typo (in another game) and self-made starvation where you have a number of chances of avoiding it? (1st: don't use rage/high food cost spells under Nausea and Very Hungry, 2nd: don't eat the brown chunk under Hungry in risky territory, use permafood instead, 3rd: use that potion of healing/heal wounds to get rid of nauseous when starving, 4th: switch to gourmand before problems occur, 5th: if you hit starving while nauseous, there is still a chance that nauseous runs out before you die).
Ultimately, I file most of the campaigning here under preemptive whining. It is an instructive example why it is good to listen to players, but not to design with them.

[Thasero]

To get back on track... the question is how to make brown chunks different from non-brown chunks.

I would actually go in the other direction: Just eliminate the difference between contaminated and clean chunks. Any possible penalty given to contaminated chunks must be light enough that food-challenged species can afford to ignore it when playing through branches that only have contaminated chunks. At the same time, if the penalty is too light, then players just eat contaminated chunks anyway like they have done historically. Rather than try to finesse this balance, why not just get rid of the whole thing?

"More different kinds of corpses" is not a potential feature we would be excited to implement now, as Galehar points out above. In the aftermath of the original food reform the one lesson that seems to be agreed on is that increasing the number of subdivisions of food and differences between them does not increase fun. "Simple" is an objective for remaining food reform implementables. All of this suggests that good design points toward fewer kinds of food, not more.

The debate over the possible penalties of brown chunks has, to my mind, gotten into a rather odd rabbit hole when arguing specifics. The average Crawl character falls down 0 shafts and is a magic-user, not a Trog-worshipper, so neither berserking nor shafting is critically central to the question of brown chunk penalties. The fact that we have to come up with comparatively unusual situations in order to make the brown chunk penalty appear to matter suggests that it mostly doesn't matter and isn't a useful gameplay mechanic.

Even if we accept as a given that making contamination matter is the correct decision, the penalty has its own problems. The penalty must be small enough that food-challenged characters can survive it. It cannot be a kind of penalty that makes new players think eating contaminated chunks is always non-optimal, so contaminated chunks must at least grant nutrition and solve the player's immediate problem. The issue with the nausea proposal is that it tries to tack on a food penalty after we've already set the precondition that contaminated chunks must give you enough food: if the chunk's nutrition lasts for X turns, the nausea must last for less than X turns, so you'll be able to eat a chunk again when you get hungry again anyway. In other words, under normal conditions the penalty doesn't matter at all. Because the value of X must be set with the possibility of high-hunger species in mind, normal-hunger characters will have at least a 40% time buffer.

I don't think it would be useful to tie the satiation status to the regeneration rate, because mechanics that lets well-fed players get higher regeneration already exist - wearing a Ring of Regeneration, or casting the Regeneration spell. In general, if we have to tie on secondary benefits to make food choice matter, that suggests to me that food choice is not a very useful game mechanic. A good mechanic should provide support to other parts of the game, rather than needing to draw support in order to achieve its own goals. I think that the original food reform had problems in part because it took the not-fun part of the food clock - having to manage gain and loss of a long-term resource in several categories, like some kind of Dungeon Accountant - and spread that not-fun around to other parts of the game, such as mutations.

Given that the choice between eating a worm or eating a cockroach just isn't great epic fantasy to begin with, and that any possible impact of that choice must be watered down for the safety of newbies and centaurs, I propose officially making the choice trivial by eliminating the 2 kinds of chunks entirely. All monsters that currently produce contaminated chunks produce clean chunks instead.

[thenewflesh]

When starving, anyone would eat anything regardless of nausea. I know, the game doesn't aim to be realistic, but dying of starvation while carrying food is just silly. It would be fair to the player to allow eating anything edible when starving, but when nauseous severely reduce the nutrition he gets from the food regardless of its type.

[galehar]

"Simple" is an objective for remaining food reform implementables. All of this suggests that good design points toward fewer kinds of food, not more.

I objected to more, but I don't think we need less. 2 is good. Well, there are more chunk types, but clean and contaminated are 99% of a normal character's diet. The point is to use brown chunks to differentiate how herbivorous eat, and how they are affected by the availability of chunks types in each branch.

The issue with the nausea proposal is that it tries to tack on a food penalty after we've already set the precondition that contaminated chunks must give you enough food: if the chunk's nutrition lasts for X turns, the nausea must last for less than X turns, so you'll be able to eat a chunk again when you get hungry again anyway.

What? Who said that? For a normal character, the nausea duration (which is randomised of course) would be on average the same as the time to digest it. So, sometimes you end up with more nutrition, sometimes with less but you always gain some time (and nauseous isn't systematic). Since herbivorous get less nutrition and longer nauseous duration, they'll often end up with less nutrition than they started with, but they gain some time, to hunt for better food.

When starving, anyone would eat anything regardless of nausea. I know, the game doesn't aim to be realistic, but dying of starvation while carrying food is just silly. It would be fair to the player to allow eating anything edible when starving, but when nauseous severely reduce the nutrition he gets from the food regardless of its type.

Think of it like you can't eat anything. You're so sick you would vomit it. Maybe calling it "sick" is better than "nauseous" after all.

[TwilightPhoenix]

I think in that case I'd eat the food, clamp down a piece of armor and seal the entrance to my mouth, and then read a scroll of curse armor and not undo the curse until the food decided to stay down. Of course, that silly thought is totally impossible in Crawl.

On a serious note, being unable to eat anything because "you're too sick to keep it down" runs into a serious consistency issue with being allowed to drink potions to cure it. If you can't keep a wholesome piece of stale bread down, how would you keep some unnatural concoction that could very well taste like ear wax and feel like it burns like acid when going down? Heck, what's to prevent the player from chugging useless potions to prevent starvation? Now that I think about it, learning Fulsome Distillation to make a bunch of Potions of Water would be a great idea for an emergency situation where you're starving, nauseated, and can't cure it since you could chug those instead and attempt to wait it out. Clever, but is it internally consistent? No. Is it desirable? I don't know, I'm not the dev here.

But anyway, after that thought, I think I'm far more opposed to nausea preventing eating while allow potion drinking on the grounds of consistency as opposed to any other reason to be. Either block potions too or don't block eating, otherwise it doesn't make a whole lot of sense and it'll at least drive me crazy. Especially considering how internally consistent the rest of the game is.

[nicolae]

On a serious note, being unable to eat anything because "you're too sick to keep it down" runs into a serious consistency issue with being allowed to drink potions to cure it. If you can't keep a wholesome piece of stale bread down, how would you keep some unnatural concoction that could very well taste like ear wax and feel like it burns like acid when going down?

Maybe potions of healing taste super great and keep your stomach from churning as soon as they hit your tongue, so it would be the only potion you could drink while nauseous, though that would make the effect much more debilitating. (Then again, in my experience with stomach ailments, liquids are usually easier to keep down than solid foods, since they don't require actual digestion.)

[absolutego]

You can chug down potions (1) anytime (2) to cure a bad status. Using them to get rid of nausea (i'd stick with this name) is consistent. They also grant a little nutrition, which works well here.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Being poisoned, sick, rotting, or confused doesn't prevent you from eating either (just checked the confusion bit in wizmode to be sure), so they're not like nausea at all. Presently, the only things preventing you from eating is being a Mummy or casting Necromutation and both also block you from drinking potions as well. The closest thing to an exception are Vampires, but they still "eat" blood, sometimes directly from a corpse.

I understand liquids are a bit easier to handle in general. Still, some are outright bad ideas to drink while sick, such as milk (not making that mistake again). In Crawl, we're talking about strange, magical concoctions which, according to their descriptions, sometimes sound quite nasty and I don't mean in taste. An oily cyan potion? A fuming green potion? Blech!

Anyway... what am I doing still awake and posting here? I need to kick myself off for bed.

[dolphin]

I, too, am for the reduction of chunk and food types. Originally, food was just rule (more like a guideline) to keep from scumming D:1 eternally. It was just there to make you keep going and keep from boring yourself.

I don't think that the food "mini-game" is or should try to be fun, that is not its purpose, and it just doesn't do fun very well. If you don't believe me, play any Pokemon game with berry trees. Blasting demons is fun; hacking giants is fun; running away from an OOD monster is thrilling (and fun); finding an artefact or highly enchanting an item is fun; managing food types isn't fun (at least, I don't think so). Making an intrinsically un-fun activity more complex doesn't necessarily lead to fun.

Essentially, I would advocate that all monsters have edible (clean) or inedible chunks (poisonous, mutagenic, hydrochloric, chunks that are too old and start rotting . . .) and possible get rid of some of those as well (particularly in the absence of Fulsome Distillation), and then reduce nutrition from chunks drastically and possibly reduce the drop rate.

Chunks and food should discourage scumming; they don't have to be fun (there are other aspects of gameplay that would increase fun more cost-effectively, like branches or magic vs melee).

Too Long, Didn't Read: KISS.

[mumra]

If food is purely for the purpose of preventing scumming, then it's a redundant system: the OOD timer prevents that (and you realise monsters stop generating after the OOD timer, rendering scumming completely pointless?)

I've seen a lot of different opinions and points of view as to what the purpose of the food clock is, and what the purposes of the reforms are. All of these points of view seem to wildly conflict and contradict.

At the end of the day, these are simply points of view. I think it would help this discussion to see a clear and directed statement from a dev as to:

a) What are the aims of the food clock
b) In what way is the current system failing these aims

Note: both of these questions have been answered already by dpeg - I just think it would help to get this discussion on track if we could see some bullet points, because frankly there are so many aspects to this whole thing that I'm not clear myself anymore!

[ryak]

Even with the Hive cut, i think the food game can easily afford reduced chunk drops. Remember the formula is d(max_chunks) + 1, so the reduction to actual number of chunks dropped is not linear with reductions to max_chunks.

Actually, the formula is 1 + random2(max_chunks) which is the same as 1d(max_chunks). I think the reduction in average chunk is linear with max_chunks reduction.

You're right. I misspoke when i said it wasn't linear. What i meant is, there is some bias as you near the 1d(1) end of the scale, which you regularly do in chunk rolls.

AVG ROLL
1:1
2:1.5
3:2
4:2.5
5:3
6:3.5
...

Halving the max only halves the average as you approach large numbers.

[dpeg]

What are the similarities between an instadeath typo (in another game) and self-made starvation where you have a number of chances of avoiding it? (1st: don't use rage/high food cost spells under Nausea and Very Hungry, 2nd: don't eat the brown chunk under Hungry in risky territory, use permafood instead, 3rd: use that potion of healing/heal wounds to get rid of nauseous when starving, 4th: switch to gourmand before problems occur, 5th: if you hit starving while nauseous, there is still a chance that nauseous runs out before you die).

My point is that the game prevents actions that are likely to directly lead to the player's death. As an alternative, how about just making nausea prevent you from using hungering abilities, similar to what starving does? That would be a genuinely dangerous penalty without leading to silly deaths.

I am still baffled. I've given you a list of reasons why nauseous does not directly lead to death!?

[KoboldLord]

Also relevantly, fatfingering your way into lava instantly takes you from perfect condition to dead. Using hunger abilities while afflicted by nausea is a much smaller risk, with substantially more time available to correct the problem. I probably wouldn't even hesitate to cast a sultana-nutrition Mephitic Cloud while nauseated, and choko-nutrition Mephitic Clouds are probably on the table too.

If nausea prevents the use of hunger-related abilities, basically the only remotely appropriate response to it with most characters is to retreat to a cleared level and mash 5 until it goes away. Casters aren't going to try clearing any monsters without spells, and melee types are crippled by losing most of their evoked and invoked abilities, too. Might as well skip straight to the end of the process, rather than enforcing a mandatory rest period.

[galehar]

Becoming starving while nauseous and not having the means to cure it would indeed directly lead to death. It's "the player's fault" that they ate the brown chunk or berserked in the first place, but it's also "the player's fault" that they pressed a key that would put them in lava. In both cases, the death will only occur because of inattention (since the action was obviously guaranteed to kill them), and deaths that occur because of inattention are never, ever interesting.

This is silly. There are plenty of ways to die of inattention, the YASD forum is full of examples. The interface tries to protect the player from typos, not from inattention or stupidity.

[jpeg]

I don't like the idea of tying regeneration to satiation because...

a) that's sort of Vampires' shtick
b) gourmand is powerful enough already without turning it into an amulet of regeneration

If the negative hunger states are supposed to have an impact, there are plenty of other ways. You could reduce damage dealt, chance of blocking/dodging attacks, or attack speed.

[dpeg]

I don't like the idea of tying regeneration to satiation because...

a) that's sort of Vampires' shtick
b) gourmand is powerful enough already without turning it into an amulet of regeneration

If the negative hunger states are supposed to have an impact, there are plenty of other ways. You could reduce damage dealt, chance of blocking/dodging attacks, or attack speed.

I agree and I retracted the Health regeneration idea. I'd also object to damage etc. as that's opaque and hard to get across. However, I think that Magic regeneration proposal has some merits: It is good for casters (who are actively playing the food game). It makes "Guardian Spirit better for those who can eat beyond satiated.

[Grimm]

The Vampire schtick is a possible model for the way forward. For Vampires, every hunger level means something, each one has advantages and disadvantages. The choice of which level to be at is a strategic one the Vampire makes.

This system of hunger level bonuses and maluses could be applied to all races, with the exception that each level would always have greater bonuses than the next lowest level. Specifics of bonuses and maluses can be worked out later. (Real life provides some ideas: when very hungry one becomes dizzy, weak, tired and confused, when full, one is clear minded and energetic.)

IF the aim is to encourage permafood consumption, this is one way to do it: structure the costs/benefits of hunger levels such that players want to stay Satiated or better, and thus dip into permafood more often.

IF the aim is to reduce chunk complication, then one possible solution is to make all chunks inedible for anyone without carni/sapro.

[nicolae]

But this is a death that can only result from inattention, not ordinary poor play like deaths to monsters. And a typo is the result of inattention...

I feel like if you end up getting yourself Nauseated while Starving, there was probably a lot of poor play leading up to that moment already.

[Baldurino]

hunger should be kept in the backround or erased entirely. Making it more intrusive in the game is boring.

Lets face it, butchering and eating is boring. People want to pwn monsters, not manage hunger levels.

Whats next, taking a dump? having a sleep requirement? this aint the sims.

[absolutego]

I agree and I retracted the Health regeneration idea. I'd also object to damage etc. as that's opaque and hard to get across. However, I think that Magic regeneration proposal has some merits: It is good for casters (who are actively playing the food game). It makes "Guardian Spirit better for those who can eat beyond satiated.

that would also make carnivore that much stronger, and that's not good.

[Kroet]

hunger should be kept in the backround or erased entirely. Making it more intrusive in the game is boring.

Lets face it, butchering and eating is boring. People want to pwn monsters, not manage hunger levels.

Whats next, taking a dump? having a sleep requirement? this aint the sims.

I agree that butchering and eating doesn't belong to the exciting parts of the game. But I had about two games where hunger really mattered. I played a spriggan enchanter, casted too many spells and didn't find enough food. So I had to rush through the dungeon, searching for appropriate food.
Of course all the problems started because I played in a bad way and had bad luck but it was fun nonetheless.

For me perfect food game would achieve the following:
(i) Normally not too annoying, but it should keep you going.
(ii) Occasionally it should force you to make dangerous dungeon exploration.
Of course (ii) shouldn't happen to often and you could tweak the numbers so it mostly happens to spellcasters and beserkers.

This post doesn't help at all because I don't have any concrete proposals. I just wanted to point out, that there are players who like a sometimes really threatening food game .

[AtT]

If food hardly means anything, what's the point of having abilities like carnivore and sapavore? What is the point of a hungerless species? Food management is a classic problem in nearly all roguelikes and is kind of a tradition of the genre. The differences in eating/nutrition should offer changes in strategy not just varying levels of annoyance. This isn't a cooking game but if food requirements are going to blend into the background completely they might as well not exist, which doesn't sound like much fun to me.

[cjo]

Without getting into the nitty gritty details, I do want to throw in my 2c as an experienced but not expert player of the current stable.

Most of my game hours get logged between character levels 1-15. Food has a major effect on my play up to the point where I find the hive. I prefer spellcasters, and I find that in order to survive, I often have to cast spells with a substantial hunger cost. Usually I get the food back in chunks, but not always. Sometimes I cast high cost spells and then still have to run afterwards. Sometimes I have to eat right before the battle in order to be able to cast, then the chunks I get rot before I am hungry again. Then, if luck is against me, I may have to eat more permafood yet before the next tough battle. And of course, monsters don't always leave chunks.

The only character of mine which ever survived to see Zot used a LOT of permafood working his way up to that 5th level spell. A better player might be able to optimize skills more effectively, but I've playing steadily for months now, so I'm not brand new. (I used to play a prior version of Crawl too, then took a break for a long time). For me, tightening the food clock in the early game would be a really unwelcome across-the-board increase in difficulty.

As for the late game, I don't feel that I've logged enough hours there to speak to that.

I know you folks are putting a lot of thought in this, and I'm not going to try to evaluate all the individual suggestions. Just please remember us less-than-perfect players!

Edit to add: I mentioned the hive because that tends to be where I finally start getting hunger costs down, not because I actually eat all those honeycombs. I'm not worried about the loss of the hive.

[twelwe]

I really do not like Nausea in it's current form. I think it is an interesting, if rather under developed idea which makes me continuously happy to be playing trunk. To me, Nausea's effect on the food clock has a good analogy to a broken dvd controller in which only two buttons work: pause and rewind. Nausea immediately pauses the food clock after the nutrition is gained as far as accumulation goes, and then goes on rewind to varying extents until the arbitrary amount of time passes and the controller resumes it's functionality. Any spellcaster with Nausea just might as well rest it off like Sickness, because fighting with Nausea is almost a guarantee to starvation, especially around the pre-during-post Lair game, even longer for Hybrids. Dare you cast any spell with a hunger cost, the descent into starvation accelerates, and I can tell you it is far more beneficial to wait out Nausea than Sickness for this reason alone. The hunger cost of spells makes Nausea a burden for all casters, hybrid or pure, and it's effect is just boring for pure melee types. There is no drawback that I can see, because as mentioned earlier in this thread, there is no benefit to staying satiated aside from a cognitive distance from starvation.

I know the usage of the word pause is flawed, but essentially eating a brown chunk will resule the food clock at the same or worse than where it was at before eating at all. The end result is no benefit from eating that chunk at all. It is as if the player didn't eat at all, aside from xp/items/piety gained. Eventually, real food will have to be consumed. This makes those complaints about Lair being rPois necessary legitimate, and forces people to either leave the level Orcish Mines spawn on clear (to periodically return and fight monsters that leave clean chunks) or eat all their permafood at that branch unless they get lucky Nausea rolls and avoid the effect or have some mutation that benefits them. God help them if they have a fast food clock like Centaurs, because they'll just make "bad" decisions in the eyes of some regarding food.

I plead of everyone to make a better determination of Nausea's role in the game, because I am not advocating it's outright removal. I think brown chunks should have a number of roles, including sickness AND nausea. Why not have brown chunks inflict Sickness and if another is eaten while sickness is active, inflict Nausea? Nausea would then almost never be a threat to starvation, because it would be very unlikely that anyone would gain the Nausea effect and be left at a very low satiation level. Whatever the solution is, it should not have higher consequences for one type of background than another.

[mumra]

There is no drawback that I can see, because as mentioned earlier in this thread, there is no benefit to staying satiated aside from a cognitive distance from starvation.

I think this is the key issue. The Hunger mechanic is highly esoteric in that it has no impact on the game except for at Starving. When I first played Crawl I (unspoiled) assumed that Hunger or worse would have some detrimental effect on my character so I generally avoided it. As I went on I gradually realised it made not one zot of difference. Actually, I also thought that Engorged would have a negative effect (think about it, when you've stuffed yourself so full that it hurts, it gets very difficult to perform any physical activity, and you'll usually feel somewhat tired and dopey, here we call it "food stupor").

It's acutally kind of counter-intuitive to have multiple named levels for a stat without those levels having any gameplay meaning. Which is why as a new player I thought they'd mean *something*.

So I was thinking about a system where food levels start having generally detrimental effects on the game.at Hungry or worse. I scrolled back in this thread and noticed Grimm already had this idea:

This system of hunger level bonuses and maluses could be applied to all races, with the exception that each level would always have greater bonuses than the next lowest level. Specifics of bonuses and maluses can be worked out later. (Real life provides some ideas: when very hungry one becomes dizzy, weak, tired and confused, when full, one is clear minded and energetic.)

To me, making the food clock relevant implies we need to actually make the hunger levels mean something in of themselves, rather than simply relying on effects tied to eating sub-optimal chunks. This makes it *always* beneficial to eat permafood once you're Hungry or worse (and how long a character will risk waiting will likely be loosely tied to how much food they have stashed).

Something like a small speed malus at Very Full / Engorged would also be a slight nerf to Gourmand, since it's not always a great idea to over stuff yourself.

[Galefury]

Whatever the solution is, it should not have higher consequences for one type of background than another.

Why not? I keep hearing that casters need a nerf all the time. Then when some change is actually bad for casters you complain? This actually sounds like a big plus for nausea.

[twelwe]

Speaking of unwanted behavior, I've had to tank creatures that drop white chunks while Nausea was active so they wouldn't die and start rotting before Nausea ended

[thenewflesh]

I don't think you're supposed to spam hungering spells in the first place as a caster. Usually you want spells that you use all the time to become hungerless as soon as possible prioritizing it above pretty much anything else. Nausea is more of a nerf for Berserkers, as hunger cost for Berserk can't be reduced with any skill or negated with spells or gear (Lich, Staff of Energy) like spell hunger.

[Megabass]

Actually, I also thought that Engorged would have a negative effect (think about it, when you've stuffed yourself so full that it hurts, it gets very difficult to perform any physical activity, and you'll usually feel somewhat tired and dopey, here we call it "food stupor").

For what it's worth, you can't drink potions at engorged.