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[Dorf and Dumb]

It seems like by the second year any fortress can sustain all its imports simply by buying all the food the caravans carry and cooking it.  I think the high end of food value needs to be looked at more closely.  I'm not that clear on all the steps going into brewing/cooking meals but they add up to too much somehow.

[Putnam]

I honestly thought you were a spambot for a second.

[Dorf and Dumb]

heh, sorry.  Just throwin' it at the wall, seeing what sticks.

[Putnam]

Well, it's because your titles are... unorthodox. Kitchens are being spammed all the time around here, restaurants too, and you posted about chicken at the same time, so I thought "wow did KFC get into the spambot business?"

[Melting Sky]

Your point is valid, although I think the game as a whole has not been balanced when it comes to the economic side of things. You get similarly crazt results from making trap components etc.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Hopefully getting the economy back isn't thaaat far off now (as in the next few years maybe), at which point I'm sure all the numbers will get looked over

[neblime]

pretty easy to crust your  ☼marble flute☼ with green glass or whatever for trade goods but I guess cooking is even less micromanagement.
Are you really surprised that humans would give all they own for dwarven cooking? Who else can mince wine? Or provide a masterfully prepared dragon sweetbread roast?

[Cobbler89]

Hopefully getting the economy back isn't thaaat far off now (as in the next few years maybe), at which point I'm sure all the numbers will get looked over

Any economy worth calling an economy would generate the numbers based on in-game circumstances (including, ideally, ease of production), wouldn't it?

[Manveru Taurënér]

Hopefully getting the economy back isn't thaaat far off now (as in the next few years maybe), at which point I'm sure all the numbers will get looked over

Any economy worth calling an economy would generate the numbers based on in-game circumstances (including, ideally, ease of production), wouldn't it?

I'd assume so yeah. There'd still be some base numbers for things though I guess, which would need tweaking from what's currently used. And much would be solved just fixing how things scale with number of parts and quality.

[Bumber]

I'm not that clear on all the steps going into brewing/cooking meals but they add up to too much somehow.

Relevant post: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=133664#msg4793652

I'd say it's the combination of the two.
As far as i can determine, prepared food value goes like this:
10*quality (entire meal) + ingredient value*quality _per ingredient_. The result is the value of each item in the stack.

For a simple example, let's take a roast made of nothing but lard (a.k.a. pig tallow), all work exceptional:
(10x5 for the whole meal) + (1x5, four times for the ingredients) = 70 per meal, stack size four, 280 for the full stack.
A roast made from nothing but duck eggs (or eggs of another "mundane" bird) would have the same per-item value, but the stack would be much larger, 50 would be quite normal, for a value of 3500 for the stack.

Counterexample for high-value ingredients with lowish amounts: roast from dwarven sugar and dwarven flour:
(10x5 for the meal) + (20x5, four times) = 450 per meal, let's say ten meals in the stack, so 4500 total value. That's already a bit more valuable than the egg roast.

And now to combine the two: a roast of ordinary eggs and _one_ bag of whip vine flour:
(10x5 for the whole meal) + (1x5 thrice for egg and 25x5 for whip vine flour) = 190 per meal, a realistic stack size of 40 results in a full stack value of 7600. More than half of the value is generated by the flour, which could be a single unit.

A quick look into my larders showed as possibly the best combined meal one of three parts dwarven sugar and one large stack of guineahen eggs, coming up at 780☼ per meal in a stack of 20 - the entire stack is valued 15 600, the value of 130 masterwork granite mugs.

I usually don't pay with food, though, it just feels too easy. I'm partial of clay and metal crafts. Those have nice value multipliers, crafts are the best use for soft metals like gold anyway, and they're a good reason to dig for magma.

[Waparius]

Outside of the economy the other huge fix for this would be if kitchens, farming and food were overhauled (as discussed in a gigantic megathread quite a while ago). Once cooking no longer works the same way as crafting, and food preservation involves more than just "shove it into a food stockpile", it won't be as easy to just export your food.

So, e.g. your *dwarven wine roast* might be worth quite a lot of Dorfbucks, but you can't export it because instead of being mass-produced it's made by your cooks just prior to serving.

What you can export is pickled plump helmet, and that's not particularly great value given that you've had to pickle it somewhere along the way. You can probably flog some +cave wheat flour biscuits+ for trail rations, but the caravans don't need all that much because they eat in taverns when they're not on the road. Maybe you'll find a good cash source in distilled spirits, but that's now a multi-step process involving brewing and distillation.

And don't forget, you need to stockpile some preserved food for winter because farming's much more difficult and dwarves might get sick if they eat nothing but +cave wheat flour biscuits+.