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[fractalman]

I propose the following quick patch to the balance-anihilating power of lavish meals* while we wait for a proper economy:

Leave the quality multipliers unchanged untill caravan arc...but change the STACK SIZE the kitchen outputs.


biscuits: no change, or very little change. (sum up the ingredients) (3) plump helmets+(5) sugar-> 8 plump helmet buscuits.
stews: you get a stack as large as the largest input.  (25) leaves+plump helmet seed+(5) sugar will give a stack of 25 stew.
lavish meals: you get the average of the input ingredients.  (25) leaves+(25) leaves+25 leaves+5 plump helmets will give you (20) quarrybush roast.

[one could even add a couple of additional categories, such as pastry and kingly confection, with higher levels being ever more wastefull, but I think I'd rather see a complete kitchen overall than have this patch taken too far. ]


pro: takes the edge off of the player's ability to buy the entirety of every caravan with just a bunch of random roasts.
pro: gives an actual incentive to make biscuits or stews; "speed-train your chefs" doesn't count.
con: a small delay towards a more long-term fix to the economy.
-but then again, it seems it should be a pretty simple fix, as long as that portion of the code isn't convoluted.

pro: even after the caravan arc is complete, this will STILL provide incentive to use biscuits over roasts, without making roasts totally worthless.  could be used as a general philosophy for more complicated dwarven cooking. 


*lavish meals are particularly bad in that one already makes them in a new fort, as they are, quite simply, better than biscuits. period. 

[Larix]

I don't like this idea. Cooking is the only way many food types can be made edible at all, the suggestion would make eggs and the like much less useful to feed a fort; that'd be punishing the more complicated/industrious food generation methods.

Since a dwarf gets the same amount of nutrition from each food item, i take the "stack sizes" of food to designate "n full meals worth of food", so you're proposing cooking should destroy 50-75% of the ingredients. When i combine enough potatoes to fill up a person and enough peas to achieve the same effect, i expect to get _two_ full meals of peas and potatoes out of the job, not one.

In my opinion, the broken thing in prepared meals isn't the stack size (that's just the sum total of ingredients used) but rather the exorbitant value per meal.

To make food/prepared food more meaningful (and less value overkill), my suggestion would be to
1- make some food processes less bountiful: food value of eggs could be keyed to nominal egg size or something, so 13 duck eggs don't count as 13 meals, just like 13 ostrich eggs (ostrich egg clutch size could use reducing while we're at it, they're currently way too simple to breed in ridiculous numbers); don't give five-for-one when processing quarry bushes etc.; generally, i think what probably many others think, too - food is a bit too easy to come by right now.
2- adjust the per-meal value of cooked food to something more reasonable, by calculating value of prepared food not "per item" but for the whole stack, taking relative amounts of ingredients used into account, i.e.

10*quality for the basic "meal stack", + (ingredient stack size*ingredient value*ingredient quality) for each ingredient, giving the value of the entire stack of prepared meals;
this could create non-integer values for individual meals, but the game handles this sort of thing in case of coins and bolts already.

So a (everything exceptional, assuming a high-level cook) roast from 15+15+15 cow meat and 2 dwarven flour would not be:
current system: 5x10 (meal) + three cases of (5*2) for the meat + (5*20) for the flour = 180 per meal =8460 for the stack

but rather

suggestion: 5*10 (meal) + (45*2*5) for all meat + (2*20*5) for the flour = 700 for the entire stack, about 15 per meal; the value per meal is moderately but not much higher than what a single "cow meat", multplied by five for exceptional quality, would give, keeping the value per meal more in proportion, i'd think. The meal stack _is_ almost entirely processed cow meat, after all.

Calculating the value of the stack according to amounts of ingredients used instead of a per-ingredient value calculation for the "base meal" (applied to each item in the stack) cuts prepared meals' value radically, because the "per-meal" value is no longer a sum total of adjusted values per ingredient and taking the individual ingredient amounts into account strongly reduces the effect of low-volume high-value ingredients. The same holds for stretching the "meal item" 10xquality value over the whole stack instead of applying it to every single meal.

The food-burning suggestion would result in 11 or 12 (depending on the rounding rules used) meals at a value of still 180 each, resulting in a value of 1980 or 2160; quartering the number of meals per stack obviously quarters the overall value generated, but it's still about thrice the result of my "food stack as a single item" value calculation.

In short, i think what makes prepared meals so unreasonable now is that their value is calculated for each base meal, guaranteeing disproportional per-meal and ludicrous stack values; treating the entire meal stack as the single product of the job and reflecting that in the value calculation would make produced value still significant but put it in a much evener proportion to value fed into it.

Edited to clarify and fix an embarrassing maths error.

[fractalman]

Biscuits would still work the same, so self-sufficient turtle forts wouldn't see much of an impact.   

The point is not to balance meals out with, say, mechanisms. The point is to get them to stop being totally over-powered relative to other over-powered trade goods like undecorated spiked balls.

With this change, balancing the economy/caravan arc should be easier...and maybe even take less time.

edit: reword.

[Larix]

Oops, i latched onto the last part of your suggestion 

But that's even worse, because biscuits are just as broken as roasts: every item in the stack gets the massive value boost of 10xquality ☼ just for being a prepared meal. 8 sheep meat biscuits, even at base quality, already are rated at 14 per meal (vs.18 in a roast from nothing but sheep meat), adding up to 112 for the stack, and a multiple of that if any kind of quality gets involved (560 ☼ if all work involved is exceptional). I've bought out caravans with nothing but biscuits, it's not really harder than with roasts: properly "buying out" a caravan with roasts to me means giving the traders a 400+% profit - with biscuits the profit may crash to a pathetic 200%; i've yet to meet traders who'd refuse such an offer.

Of course, even with prepared meals "fixed" one way or another, trade would still be hilariously broken, and as long as the per-meal value remained the same, your suggestion wouldn't make them notably less broken, it'd just break roasts to complete uselessness in the context of the kitchen. The suggested "average" rule actually means 3/4 of ingredients vanish.

Just for reference, two examples from a fort of mine:
stack of 22 "hen egg biscuit", no quality - 308 ☼ (14☼ per)
stack of 21 "hen egg roast", no quality - 378 ☼ (18☼ per).
To convert the same amount of raw materials to food, roasts take significantly fewer jobs; the value increase ranges from minimal in the above example to significant but still moderate with something a bit more expensive than ordinary eggs (30☼ per biscuit vs. 50☼ per roast when cooking cheese, e.g.). Everything else being equal, a roast is less than twice as valuable as a biscuit.
It's not roasts specifically that are broken, it's prepared meals in general.