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Give us a reason to produce a variety of foods and a use for low-tier food in the late game


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I've played ONI on and off for a long time now, but I rarely stick with a colony long enough to get to what you might call the late game. In my latest run though, between wild sources and my own small farming/ranching operations, I have a pretty decent supply of mid/high-tier foods: barbeque, mushroom wraps, a bit of surf'n'turf.

Now I'm at a point where I can pretty easily start farming sleet wheat and pepper plants to make pepper bread, and with that, it looks like I'm about to permanently obsolete all the other food. That's sort of a bummer.

One of the most common types of thread on the forums here is designs for automated critter ranching and slaughtering. People are always talking about producing meat and eggs. But why? I was looking forward to figuring out my own version of one of those systems after achieving mid-game stability, and I might still do that to produce other resources like lime, but I won't have any use that I can see for the food yield from critters. (I guess it provides a little bit of compost, but I mean for eating.)

Not only is there no mechanical incentive to keep making a variety of foods late game, there's actually a disincentive since I'd be sacrificing the morale boost from feeding everyone pepper bread. So even if I want to give my dupes different foods just for fun, I'm paying a price to do it. This seems like a missed opportunity in mechanical terms since it narrows down the scope of the game, and it's fairly counter-intuitive (even "unrealistic" if I can use that word) to boot. IRL, varied diets are important for health and most people would be bored to tears eating only one food forever, even if it was the "best" food in the world.

Am I missing something here, or is there really no use for lower-tier food late game? If so, I can think of a few changes to address this issue:

  • Add more +5/+6 quality recipes - could be done by moving existing recipes or creating new ones (eggs are pretty under-utilized!)
  • Flatten the morale bonus in some way (e.g. reduce the number of tiers and distribute existing recipes so we have several in the new top tier)
  • Provide a scaling morale bonus for providing a varied diet that compensates for (or exceeds) the penalty for using some lower-tier foods

Personally I think the last one is the most fun, but they could be done in combination. More recipes would be welcome, for sure.

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As long as morale expectations are exceeded there is no indispensable need for the morale boost given by pepper bread. I dont think it's that much of an incentive. Whereas it's easy currently to produce free food using critters, which is why people favors ranching.

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How about adding a preferred food prefence to the dupes.  It would be random, and on the roll.  

Maybe they only get the morale  boost when they eat the preferred food or maybe it stacks on to it as a new boost.  

This could add a cool dynamic to the game.

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1 hour ago, Mariilyn said:

As long as morale expectations are exceeded there is no indispensable need for the morale boost given by pepper bread. I dont think it's that much of an incentive. Whereas it's easy currently to produce free food using critters, which is why people favors ranching.

It's a fair point, the mechanical incentive to abandon +3/4 quality foods isn't super-strong. It just bugs me on principle that the game's design points in that direction when it could either encourage variety or at least be neutral about it with some very minor changes.

Also, just realized I've ignored Spicy Tofu so far in this thread. I started this run on a default asteroid and I haven't seen a nosh sprout yet. I assume the only way I can find some is via space exploration. I guess that would at least give me one other +5 food to use, assuming I can also get what I need for ethanol production.

11 minutes ago, xantar2482 said:

How about adding a preferred food prefence to the dupes.  It would be random, and on the roll.  

Maybe they only get the morale  boost when they eat the preferred food or maybe it stacks on to it as a new boost.  

This could add a cool dynamic to the game.

That's a really fun idea. I would imagine it as a set of 2-3 foods per dupe, with the boost stacking on the existing morale bonus. Maybe the equivalent of increasing the food's quality level by 1. To ensure that it affects late-game food choices, it could guarantee that one of the foods rolled would be from the +4 tier.

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