Idea to reduce food waste and make "big foods" more beneficial

MrShuriken · 2019-11-06 10:23:01

How about the more stuffed you are the quicker your food bar depletes, meaning eating extra food is still wasteful past a point
However, to counteract this you gain 10% speed, as it resembles your metabolism getting faster to process the food.

It would obviously scale with how much over you was, Therefore eating a super big pie would still be useful for extra food supply and speed, but it wouldn't mean you didn't have to eat food at all.

You shouldn't be able to not eat food when running around, you should always need food.
On the contrary, people standing still should require less food, meaning AFK players could stay alive even when, well AFK

Twisted · 2019-11-06 10:24:52

Yes, please. Do it. I've been saying it should work like this for a while.

Sure, there are other problems with the food system, but this is overall a change that makes sense and also a change that will make the game MUCH easier to learn for new players.

One other suggestion that I'd love to see implemented alongside this change is to make yum chains unbreakable, thus making food variety even more beneficial. Eating a MEH food simply keeps your chain as it is without giving you bonus food.

Also, +1 for food decay. Make foods decay while outdoors, and not decay while indoors. Boom, buildings now have a use.

tobiasisahawk · 2019-11-06 19:27:30

I really like this idea. For experienced players, starving isn't much of an issue so they won't see the change as making the game easier. However, this will make staying alive easier for new players. That will give new players more time to learn the game and hopefully get more people to stay.

What do you think about changing starvation so that before players die they get sick for a period of time and need someone to feed them? Maybe movement speed drops to 0 and some visual indication like yellow fever. When a player enters the village with yellow fever everyone drops what they are doing and rushes to save the person. The same would likely happen for starving players providing a visceral experience (one of the things that hooks people to this game). It can also act as a new-player notification for the whole village without breaking immersion. Additionally it will make teaching new players much easier since they won't suddenly drop dead halfway through the lesson.

jasonrohrer · 2019-11-06 19:41:23

Twisted, any suggestions for how to deal with the "stuff a pie in a baby" problem?

Miska's curve would solve the problem (your number of bonus food slots from overeating ramps up in adulthood and ramps back down in old age).

But this kind of "hidden curve" is hard for players to understand and reason about.

Same for a hidden binary state (like you can only benefit from overeating when you are 20+ years old).

Currently, kids have small stomachs, which makes them more vulnerable. Staying close to home until at least 10 is a good idea, and that feels correct thematically. And yeah, you could carry a backpack full of pies at a young age for a long journey, but it would be very wasteful.

jasonrohrer · 2019-11-06 19:50:25

One thing I still love about this idea is that it doesn't change food burn per person per hour at all. The "long term difficulty" of the game as a collective civ doesn't change. You will go through water and oil for food production at the same rate.

The only spot where this is not true is in waste reduction. It's possible to eat with no waste in the game currently, but most players don't ever do that. So with this change, there will be no waste, and a slight efficiency gain from that, and thus a slightly slower collective food burn.

What is effectively happening here is that we reduce the "how often you need to eat" without reducing the food burn rate. Something similar could be done by simply increasing max stomach size (though this is harder, because of room on the screen).

Also, for under-3 bb (and even older), breastfeeding is still king for water efficiency.... but that fact won't dissuade busy mothers from stuffing a burrito and walking away. And even if they don't walk away, if they're trying to max gene score, stuffing a burrito is much safer than babysitting for "F" signals, right?

miskas · 2019-11-06 20:24:49

Hard for players to understand and reason about.

from reasoning perspective, as you reach puberty your stomach is bigger and you can overeat to metabolize it later.

From an understanding perspective.
https://onehouronelife.gamepedia.com/Li … ars_old.29
As long as you look like a teenager you can start overeating

But most important. differentiate the peeps from 11 to 20 OR put a sign between the 10th and 11th peep so people see that something is going on. Instead of normal Squares, peeps could look like a belly D

Twisted · 2019-11-06 20:32:51

For babies it could work the same way it currently does, no bonus food for them. You can't stuff a pie into a baby in real life, you gotta take care of them, so I think it would still make sense.

I'd also be for ~doubling all food values while also doubling our max food bar, as that would allow for more fine grained food balancing. I remember making a quick mockup () on the OHOL discord back in February just to imagine what it might look like.

Last edited by Twisted (2019-11-06 20:34:16)

wondible · 2019-11-06 20:50:18

jasonrohrer wrote:

What is effectively happening here is that we reduce the "how often you need to eat" without reducing the food burn rate. Something similar could be done by simply increasing max stomach size (though this is harder, because of room on the screen).
Also, for under-3 bb (and even older), breastfeeding is still king for water efficiency.... but that fact won't dissuade busy mothers from stuffing a burrito and walking away.

1. Double max food boxes.
2. You can't overeat. Your buffer is notably larger than any food, so you never need to push starvation for big stuff (at least as an adult)
3. Change the pip representation. Either thinner boxes, or full and half-size boxes similar to Zelda hearts.
4. Leave starting/ending (baby/old) effective pips the same - it will be shorter on screen. We lose one-year-per-pip but something has to give. Unless you get them two at a time, (still one box for the small-box version) it takes longer to reach max food, and you have less time at the top.

Okay, one caveat: if you can't overeat and as a young child the only available food is too big, you starve. Maybe there is an exception where you can waste if you are actually on death's door.

You could probably test this server-side only - just divide the boxes by two in messages, then update the client to show the extra detail if it works out.

Joseph Stalin · 2019-11-06 21:34:09

Make it so that babies can only eat brestmilk and mashed food, maybe cow milk but idk if thats how it works, then make old adults have this restriction too minus brest milk, then add more liquidy food for them like mashed potato

Angel Carrillo · 2019-11-06 21:34:13

What if genetic fitness affected the amount of hunger pips you would gain?
Genetic Fitness of 0, you get the classic 20.
Genetic Fitness of 60, you get twice as many, or 40.

Last edited by Angel Carrillo (2019-11-06 21:47:23)

tobiasisahawk · 2019-11-06 21:42:32

Angel Carrillo wrote:

What if genetic fitness affected the amount of hunger pips you had?

It does. The higher your genetic fitness, the more hunger pips you retain when you get old.

jasonrohrer · 2019-11-06 21:49:15

Wondible, I'm really worried about any mechanic where you've got food in your hand but you just can't eat it. Dammit, let me eat this! I'm dying here. Let me at least nibble the crust or something.

Coconut Fruit · 2019-11-06 22:00:29

I'm against doubling stomach size, unreasonable thing to do. It could give more freedom when to eat a big food but it would make things too easy.

To me the best way would look like this: reduce stomach size to 15 pips, 2x limit for +pips for current stomach size (that would be 15 pips + 15 pips for an adult), you can possibly lower a little bit stomach size for kids and elders. +pips unavailable for kids younger than 3y (makes sense since they have undeveloped stomach at that age)

Surely this update would make living easier, In most cases I'm against making things easier, so I don't really care if this update will happen or not. It's not something that is really needed.

Food still could be wasted a little when eating very big things being almost full but it would give a little bit more freedom on to when eat a big food. In current state it's a little bit annoying to wait until starving before eating a very big food.

Redram · 2019-11-06 22:15:20

Twisted wrote:

I remember making a quick mockup (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ … nknown.png) on the OHOL discord back in February just to imagine what it might look like.

That's not a great look. It looks like there's a 'forbidding' slash. Better to just offset ghost a box 'underneath' each, like a drop shadow, except it's the opposite of a shadow. That would also make it automatically and intuitively conform with 2x the length of the current bar. The boxes on top fill first, the boxes 'underneath' fill on overeating.

Kinrany · 2019-11-06 23:11:13

Babies and elderly would still be vulnerable if the bonus peeps are limited by 2x the normal peeps. They can overeat, but not so much that they only need to eat once. And their normal peep limit is low, so the risk of accidentally dying of hunger is higher.

Another idea is to keep babies and elderly people fragile with a completely different mechanic. Have a second (third?) parameter: disease/immunity. It could potentially heavily affect both the city layout (see Oxygen Not Included) and the society (by making it necessary to enforce rules).

jasonrohrer · 2019-11-06 23:27:43

Kinrany, when and where did the lingo transition from "pip" to "peep"?

Yeah, I don't really want to make the game easier, at all.... so I'm going to leave this one alone for now. Maybe will revisit in the future.

wondible · 2019-11-06 23:45:39

jasonrohrer wrote:

Wondible, I'm really worried about any mechanic where you've got food in your hand but you just can't eat it. Dammit, let me eat this! I'm dying here. Let me at least nibble the crust or something.

Ran across the young kids while writing. But I'm having trouble reconciling

- "let me eat this" and
- not letting the baby eat the burrito

There could be generic "Leftovers (1)", "Leftovers (2)" etc items, but a lot of food doesn't leave your hand free, so where does it go?

Going back to the basic +X design, A simpler overage limit formula would be (base pips) minus 4. Babies are nearly the same, growth is linear, and overage can be represented as marks above the existing food pips, or perhaps larger overfull boxes. Having a limit means there will still be wastage, but not as much. The "let me eat this" limit is the same as now - a box has to be empty.

pein · 2019-11-07 00:20:24

Yum is not an interesting mechanic, for like 1 game I tried having max variety but that's just a meme, it's not even saving time, and it's annoying to keep in mind what I ate last time.

Plus the fact that some foods are cooked, so they use tools, while others not, this unique chain doesn't really make sense for experienced players cause they know it's wasteful to even plant those green beans, but some yumofiles will still do it and they think they are some kind of experts and save a lot of food for others, while in reality, they are barely neutral. Even eating berries can be okay if you produce more than you use up.

The whole point of yum and food diversity was not to munch berries, not that to compete on how many different foods you can eat. It just promotes selfish behaviour and I haven't seen this yumofiles create yum food for others, they just spend most of their lives doing one food at a time for themselves.

I think a top cap to yum would be beneficial. If players could only gain so much yum bonus, they would stop at that number, and maybe create enough of it for others to reach higher yum number. Also would give a feeling of accomplishment. If you can reach 10 or 16 or whatever yum needed you to know is you good that life. Also would help with organizing to plan for that number of foods(2x2 wood boards filled with one type of food, space, more storage locations). Also wouldn't matter that you got 1 goose or 1 green bean, "variety" would be the keyword, not "unique foods" for yourself. Wouldn't be a too popular choice but that's why was yum invented to change berry munching.
So if a pseudo nerf comes to yumming, then you should re-evaluate that too. It just feels so annoying to count how much and what I ate, also it isn't really a thing to eat banana and burdock late-game, still feels like I'm missing out. I'm kind of a perfectionist and open-ended things aren't my thing when it comes to bonuses and I'm sure others feel the same. We only got 60 minutes, wasting it on eating different foods for the sake of yum doesn't feel like a fun mechanic, yet the yum based bonuses feel overpowered. If it would be like 10-16 yum or whatever number to reach, I would do it, but right now I can't say I focus on it at all.

Food is kinda easy to make, it got buffed several times. Now with the water nerfs and the tool nerfs (oven, hot coals, fire making tools), compost got to an all-time low value, where hoe uses cost less than the extra bowl of soil so the food buffer buff wouldn't be too bad now.

Visual differentiation would be also fun, if you overeat multiple times, you would become fat, a bit slower. Undereating could be when you go below 10 food multiple times. That would be helpful to see people who can't manage their food well. Might be that some people would kill the fatties but then people would understand why is important to keep food waste low.

Saolin · 2019-11-07 01:07:00

I had been thinking about a week ago of a way to re-balance food and hunger, for a different purpose, which was to more evenly balance survivability in early eve settlements and late game towns with the intention being to make them more equal in terms of their impact on genetic fitness. But I suppose it could be reworked to implement Jason's idea of introducing more powerful food items instead or as well.

Basically the idea was if you decrease pip drain so you lose pips more slowly, and decrease the pip gain of various food items such as pies and other later game foods you can maintain or increase difficulty of survivability in late game, while decreasing or maintaining food pressure in eve camps so that survivability is more similar between the stages of gameplay. I think also though berries and popcorn would need to give decreased pips as well to keep their power level appropriate and avoid a potential berry muncher's heaven in late game.

So anyway this idea could be entirely re-purposed to introduce more powerful food items by changing values related to pip drain and pips gained from eating. The tools are already there (i think?) to introduce bigger food items. It would have no impact on overeating, though I don't really see overeating as a problem, but i guess it would decrease food pressure if everyone always got full value out of their bites.

Last edited by Saolin (2019-11-07 01:10:42)

Spoonwood · 2019-11-07 04:52:02

Jason, I just want to say that a fair number of people above have said that they would like this change or some other change, all of which, from my quick read, would make the game easier. Maybe not a lot easier, but nonetheless they consist of veteran players thinking that an easier game would be better.

seth · 2019-11-07 05:18:15

Haven't read all the content here, but how bout it's a tradeoff?

I know I'm capable of eating everything on my plate at all times, but if I overeat, my energy levels go way down. So yeah I won't need to eat again for a while, but I'm not about to run around being productive.. probably just lay on the couch, maybe nap.

So, what if you're slower by a percentage when you over eat?

.. just saw Pein suggesting slowness being something you gain over time. That's interesting too - then you could make a calculated tradeoff.. Thought that might be harder to reason about..

Yeah I kinda like if it just slows you down proportional to your total food capacity how far over you go (perhaps in a curve). Then you'd really regret binging on that pie. Particularly as a little kid! That would teach em..

CatX · 2019-11-07 08:27:30

Overeating could cause stomach ache.
It could put you in a "wounded" state for a few seconds, but without the risk of dying.
Medics could distribute medicine.

Kinrany · 2019-11-07 10:22:40

jasonrohrer wrote:

Kinrany, when and where did the lingo transition from "pip" to "peep"?

Only in my mind, haha. English-as-a-second-language problems, sorry.

tobiasisahawk · 2019-11-07 16:31:28

tl;dr - Doubling the food bar makes the game easier for new players and harder for experienced players. That's a good thing.

On an individual level, food is a skill cliff. When you first start off, you starve all the time because you forget to eat. This makes it hard for new players to learn the game. Many people give up and stop playing the game because of this. How many times have people commented on this forum that you should learn to play by reading the wiki or onetech? This is because it's impossible for new players to do anything somewhat complicated while trying to find food. This is why we have so many berry munchers in villages. These players are trained that if they stray too far from the bushes, they will starve before they can find their way back.

Conversely, once you get over the skill cliff, food is almost a non issue. You learn how village layouts tend to work and can quickly find the kitchen to grab pies. You know to keep a pie in your backpack. A mutton pie is 60 pips of food you can carry in one item slot.

A full person carrying a mutton pie has 80 pips to go through before they'll starve. If you double the food bar it only goes up to 100 pips. This 25% increase will not make a meaningful impact on experienced players. On the other hand, new players haven't learned to carry food with them yet and they don't know how to use backpacks. For them, the difference is a 100% increase in time to do things. It makes leaving the berry bush and exploring the town a little bit safer.

Interestingly, doubling the food bar makes the game harder on a village level. When people see food supplies running low, they start to hoard food. Hoarding food lowers food supplies leading to a positive feedback loop. When food supplies get low enough people stop working and spend all of their time looking for food leading villages to famines.

DestinyCall · 2019-11-07 16:34:21

CatX wrote:

Overeating could cause stomach ache.
It could put you in a "wounded" state for a few seconds, but without the risk of dying.
Medics could distribute medicine.

When you are "wounded" you move more slowly and can't hold objects. The main threat is starvation (if your hunger bar is low) or death due to the wound.

With over-eating, your pip bar would be full, so there's no danger of starving. And a bellyache shouldn't be fatal, so that part shouldn't apply. The main risk would be that you wouldn't be able to defend yourself from being attacked, but I don't imagine that would be a common occurance. The bigger danger would be lost time. Eating too much would cost you time, since you have to deal with being ill - slow and unable to work.

You might have the amount of time increase based on how much you over-consume. So maybe one or two pips over does nothing. But over-eating by four or five pips makes you feel sick for a few seconds. Over eating by 10+ pips would impair you for even longer.

You could push it a little if you want to "stock-up" before a long journey, but you would generally want to avoid gorging yourself at every meal, since I don't think people would like the feeling of being ill and temporarily incapacitated.

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