Dungeon Dilettante
Posts: 4
Joined: Thursday, 13th October 2011, 15:26
Thursday, 10th November 2011, 21:25
Food Clock
Been reading stuff about the food reform, hive reform etc. and it's got me to thinking about the food clock in general terms.
What is the purpose of the food clock?
In my opinion, the food clock exists to serve two purposes which are in the "main design goals" and that is to limit grinding, and to create meaningful decisions.
Limiting Grinding:
Mummies, unhindered by the food clock can potentially stay on a level forever killing respawning monsters. To combat this, OOD monsters start spawning when you spend too much time on a level. Non-mummy races don't really have this issue because it's impossible to spend that much time on a level without starving to death. If you could, and there were no mechanisms to force you to move, the game would be a boring mess of players sitting on early levels, waiting out respawns, and powering up their characters to the point that future levels would be trivial.
Providing meaningful decisions:
Food comes into the day to day progress of a character in two major ways: Berserk for melee, and Spells for casters. Both melee characters and spell casters can get by without spending their food. Melee can avoid berserking, and casters can use less powerful spells that they have mastered. Using high level spells, or berserking, will generally make for a more favorable outcome in a battle, so to stop players from berserking for every encounter, or never using their mastered spells when they learn a new one, they have to decide whether it's worth the food cost.
So we have two somewhat distinct but related goals. We've also got other funny things like mutations and cursed items that play with hunger, but that's beside the point. Pre 0.10, we have two simple food types, chunks and permafood. I know things are up in the air post 0.9, but I'll focus on pre 0.10 for now.
Chunks are a bit funny because they're not always available. It's hard to find chunks in the abyss, or the crypt, it's easy to find them in the hive or the lair. Chunks will generally fill you up 1/3 to half nutrition, meaning you're constantly at risk of starving when relying on chunks.
Permafood is funny because it's random, with a large stash of it in hive and bee vaults. It will fill you right up but there's a limited quantity of it in the dungeon. Harpies will eat it and you'll curse their name. You can stash it but then you use up nutrition reclaiming it.
Something I notice about this system is that two separate problems are trying to be solved by a single solution. You need a renewable source of food to deal with ability use, and you need a non-renewable source of food to prevent farming. If food is completely renewable, you run into a situation where it's easy enough to farm forever. If food is completely non-renewable, using your abilities stops becoming a reasonable choice, and something to do only in last-ditch circumstances. Herbivores currently make poor berserkers. Currently though, chunks fill the renewable void, and permafood fills the non-renewable void. The issue is that they cross over a lot, meaning that you can avoid eating permafood by being careful about eating chunks. Gourmand makes this even easier.
What I think would make a good solution is to split the food system in half.
Half 1) Remove all chunks from your mind. Then remove spell hunger and berserk hunger. Permafood is the only food that exists, and turns are the only thing that exhausts it. This solves the farming issue. Manage permafood so that there's going to be enough to take you through the dungeon and extended content. Call this stat Nutrition instead of Hunger. Running out of nutrition will start to make your stats fall at a low level and eventually lead to starvation death.
Half 2) Reintroduce chunks and spell hunger and berserk hunger. But call this stat Energy instead of Hunger. Losing energy will not kill you, it will just make you sluggish at it's lowest level. Being low on Energy means you can not go Berserk or cast spells that use Energy. Eating chunks is the primary source of energy. Certain permafood might contain some energy as well.
Herbivore/Carnivore/Saprovore:
The herbivore/carnivore continuum would change up a little bit. The primary thing would be that carnivores would be more suited to eating chunks, so they would get more energy from them, meaning they would be more frequently able to use those high powered spells and abilities. On the other hand, Herbivores would be more efficient at eating permafood, meaning that they could simply spend more turns in the dungeon before running out of food, or being forced to the next level. Saprovore means you get to keep your chunks longer, giving you more flexibility with when you use those abilities, but not necessarily more opportunities.
Carnivore increases the limit of energy that you can eat chunks at from 2500 at 0 to 5000 at 1, 7500 at 2, and 10000 at 3, but reduces the nutrition you get from permafood by 10%, 20%, 30%. At rank 3 Carnivore, eating any vegetation makes you nauseated for a significant number of turns restricting you from eating chunks.
Herbivore decreases the energy that you can eat chunks at to 1750, 1000, and 250. However it increases the nutrition you get from permafood by 20%, 40%, 60%. At rank 3, eating chunks can cause you to become ill. While ill you have the chance to vomit, reducing nutrition by some amount and losing a turn. However, at rank 3 you also have the ability to gain energy from plants and fungus as well.
I think a split like this could alleviate some of the frustrating problems with the food clock. Currently the food minigame is "Always eat chunks, unless you're about to starve, in which case eat as little permafood as possible to find more chunks". Because of that, it's always frustrating every time you have to eat permafood, and something like gourmand makes the whole system pointless. A solution like this would change it so that you would always eat permafood. You could never get around the food clock by optimizing the chunk mini-game, so you'd have a very difficult time grinding. Decisions on how to eat permafood would be long term strategic decisions rather than punitive short term decisions. You're only going for a 3 rune ascension? You can spend some extra time in some levels as a carnivore because you'll need less food overall, carnivore will let you berserk and make things a bit easier. You're going for a 15 rune run instead? You need to start making good decisions, don't linger too much, don't put yourself in situations where you require a lot of healing time, skip certain vaults, maybe err towards a less hardy more vegetarian race.
You'd want to make most permafood into vegetables, and make some chunks edible by vegetarians. (Honeycomb would be a good example of energy food for veggies) but the whole idea is to never run into a situation where you ask yourself "Do I need to waste permafood, or can I find another chunk to eat" Permafood would be for something completely different than Chunks. And while permafood could maybe provide energy on occasion (it's OK to ask the player to sacrifice the scarce resource) chunks should never provide nutrition (it's less OK to allow players to save the scarce resource by replacing it with a renewable resource)
Anyways, this isn't really a suggestion or anything, I just needed a way to distract myself so I thought I'd write words on the Internet.
What is the purpose of the food clock?
In my opinion, the food clock exists to serve two purposes which are in the "main design goals" and that is to limit grinding, and to create meaningful decisions.
Limiting Grinding:
Mummies, unhindered by the food clock can potentially stay on a level forever killing respawning monsters. To combat this, OOD monsters start spawning when you spend too much time on a level. Non-mummy races don't really have this issue because it's impossible to spend that much time on a level without starving to death. If you could, and there were no mechanisms to force you to move, the game would be a boring mess of players sitting on early levels, waiting out respawns, and powering up their characters to the point that future levels would be trivial.
Providing meaningful decisions:
Food comes into the day to day progress of a character in two major ways: Berserk for melee, and Spells for casters. Both melee characters and spell casters can get by without spending their food. Melee can avoid berserking, and casters can use less powerful spells that they have mastered. Using high level spells, or berserking, will generally make for a more favorable outcome in a battle, so to stop players from berserking for every encounter, or never using their mastered spells when they learn a new one, they have to decide whether it's worth the food cost.
So we have two somewhat distinct but related goals. We've also got other funny things like mutations and cursed items that play with hunger, but that's beside the point. Pre 0.10, we have two simple food types, chunks and permafood. I know things are up in the air post 0.9, but I'll focus on pre 0.10 for now.
Chunks are a bit funny because they're not always available. It's hard to find chunks in the abyss, or the crypt, it's easy to find them in the hive or the lair. Chunks will generally fill you up 1/3 to half nutrition, meaning you're constantly at risk of starving when relying on chunks.
Permafood is funny because it's random, with a large stash of it in hive and bee vaults. It will fill you right up but there's a limited quantity of it in the dungeon. Harpies will eat it and you'll curse their name. You can stash it but then you use up nutrition reclaiming it.
Something I notice about this system is that two separate problems are trying to be solved by a single solution. You need a renewable source of food to deal with ability use, and you need a non-renewable source of food to prevent farming. If food is completely renewable, you run into a situation where it's easy enough to farm forever. If food is completely non-renewable, using your abilities stops becoming a reasonable choice, and something to do only in last-ditch circumstances. Herbivores currently make poor berserkers. Currently though, chunks fill the renewable void, and permafood fills the non-renewable void. The issue is that they cross over a lot, meaning that you can avoid eating permafood by being careful about eating chunks. Gourmand makes this even easier.
What I think would make a good solution is to split the food system in half.
Half 1) Remove all chunks from your mind. Then remove spell hunger and berserk hunger. Permafood is the only food that exists, and turns are the only thing that exhausts it. This solves the farming issue. Manage permafood so that there's going to be enough to take you through the dungeon and extended content. Call this stat Nutrition instead of Hunger. Running out of nutrition will start to make your stats fall at a low level and eventually lead to starvation death.
Half 2) Reintroduce chunks and spell hunger and berserk hunger. But call this stat Energy instead of Hunger. Losing energy will not kill you, it will just make you sluggish at it's lowest level. Being low on Energy means you can not go Berserk or cast spells that use Energy. Eating chunks is the primary source of energy. Certain permafood might contain some energy as well.
Herbivore/Carnivore/Saprovore:
The herbivore/carnivore continuum would change up a little bit. The primary thing would be that carnivores would be more suited to eating chunks, so they would get more energy from them, meaning they would be more frequently able to use those high powered spells and abilities. On the other hand, Herbivores would be more efficient at eating permafood, meaning that they could simply spend more turns in the dungeon before running out of food, or being forced to the next level. Saprovore means you get to keep your chunks longer, giving you more flexibility with when you use those abilities, but not necessarily more opportunities.
Carnivore increases the limit of energy that you can eat chunks at from 2500 at 0 to 5000 at 1, 7500 at 2, and 10000 at 3, but reduces the nutrition you get from permafood by 10%, 20%, 30%. At rank 3 Carnivore, eating any vegetation makes you nauseated for a significant number of turns restricting you from eating chunks.
Herbivore decreases the energy that you can eat chunks at to 1750, 1000, and 250. However it increases the nutrition you get from permafood by 20%, 40%, 60%. At rank 3, eating chunks can cause you to become ill. While ill you have the chance to vomit, reducing nutrition by some amount and losing a turn. However, at rank 3 you also have the ability to gain energy from plants and fungus as well.
I think a split like this could alleviate some of the frustrating problems with the food clock. Currently the food minigame is "Always eat chunks, unless you're about to starve, in which case eat as little permafood as possible to find more chunks". Because of that, it's always frustrating every time you have to eat permafood, and something like gourmand makes the whole system pointless. A solution like this would change it so that you would always eat permafood. You could never get around the food clock by optimizing the chunk mini-game, so you'd have a very difficult time grinding. Decisions on how to eat permafood would be long term strategic decisions rather than punitive short term decisions. You're only going for a 3 rune ascension? You can spend some extra time in some levels as a carnivore because you'll need less food overall, carnivore will let you berserk and make things a bit easier. You're going for a 15 rune run instead? You need to start making good decisions, don't linger too much, don't put yourself in situations where you require a lot of healing time, skip certain vaults, maybe err towards a less hardy more vegetarian race.
You'd want to make most permafood into vegetables, and make some chunks edible by vegetarians. (Honeycomb would be a good example of energy food for veggies) but the whole idea is to never run into a situation where you ask yourself "Do I need to waste permafood, or can I find another chunk to eat" Permafood would be for something completely different than Chunks. And while permafood could maybe provide energy on occasion (it's OK to ask the player to sacrifice the scarce resource) chunks should never provide nutrition (it's less OK to allow players to save the scarce resource by replacing it with a renewable resource)
Anyways, this isn't really a suggestion or anything, I just needed a way to distract myself so I thought I'd write words on the Internet.
).
