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[PatrikLundell]

The "expand" buttons would help (that's essentially what my 'd'etail command does but implemented slightly differently).
I quite like your descriptive way of describing meals, and I think it would work quite well in adventure mode. In fortress mode (and probably adventure mode as well) it would probably benefit from turning the kitchen upside down: instead of preparing meals for 10 years, it would salt, pickle, dry, smoke, jam, ... food to preserve it, as well as producing intermediate things such as bread. The tavern, on its part, would serve meals to match dorfs' orders (given available resources), or possibly act as a real restaurant with a set menu allowing minor modification (well done, extra peppers, no tomato...). The drawback with that scenario is that the medieval culinary arts were quite primitive, with few ingredients and variations. The main difference between kings and peasants was that kings ate expensive and rare stuff (whole grilled lion would probably rank very high) with lots of meat (unimaginably and poorly prepared by current standards), while the amount of meat decreased the further down the lines you came, but most ate more or less the same thing every day.

[NW_Kohaku]

Dwarves don't really have a system of "peasants" and "kings" like medieval (human) life, though.  They live far more communally. 

Besides that, [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7148534.stm]the concept of a peasant eating nothing but porridge every day was a Victorian myth[/url], (also,) they tended to eat more varied diets, at least outside of Winter.  A peasant's dinner might be some bread, cheese, and a stew of some rabbit or fish they caught with garden vegetables or marinated in one of their orchard's lemon's juice with some herbs.

Anyway, I strongly back Jiri Petru's idea that "Dining Halls" or taverns are actually something more similar to a cafeteria.  Real life, historical mead halls or taverns would have a menu of one or two different things, usually something like a stew or soup served from a big pot where they threw the day's ingredients in and let simmer while letting anyone who paid the entrance fee. These were not meals you packaged up and stored. Again, the idea would be that a kitchen "zone" might have a cauldron for a stew as a built furniture, from which hungry dwarves would take their meal.  When empty, a cook would come and fill it back up.

Not everything that was "dine in" would necessarily be a stew or soup, of course, although it is more versatile as a cooking method, and roasted, sauteed, or fried foods would also be available.  Frying foods was especially popular among the poorer, because it meant more calories for those who performed demanding, high-calorie labor like woodworking. Modern pigs are generally lean and bred for meat, but historically, were ludicrously obese, and bred for lard.  Before vegetable oil was popular, it was how you greased the pan, it flavored food, it made good lamp oil, it sealed jars air-tight, made soap, etc.

For meals that would last a little while, so that someone might buy it as the equivalent of "take out dining", pies were quite common.  A bakery could sell pies with nearly anything inside, and it would last for a few days so you could eat at home, although one could certainly dine-in with a pie, as well.

Real preserved foods, meanwhile, would almost certainly be dried and salted meat/jerky/lutefisk, salty crackers and hard cheese. Pickles (vegetables) and jams (fruits) exist, but pots to contain them are bulky, and the major reason to eat this stuff was because you were on the road, so they wouldn't be preserved in large quantities outside of a few family stashes of jam or pickles for flavor through Winter.  Regardless, it would invariably be preferable to eat a nice, warm, fresh stew to ancient biscuits that you have to boil in lard to make soft enough that your teeth could actually win the fight against them.

I better stop here, though, because I might start down talking about nutrition models...

[PatrikLundell]

DF not actually following the medieval system always makes it a judgement call to define the extent to which the medieval context should be applied to dwarves.

It seems your medieval references are more (geographically) southern than mine (lemon). Porridge, bread, cheese, vegetables, and tubers (as potatoes hadn't been discovered yet, so it had to be beet, cabbage, swede, etc) ought to have been the standard fare. Possibly some fish, but the lords generally laid claim to the forests, so hunting would be in the realm of poaching, but fishing in the lakes was not restricted. Some honey, and fruits and berries when in season, which would also result in hectic preservation activity for the long winter, as whatever wasn't either eaten fresh or preserved was lost. The peasants who had cows were the well-to-do ones, though, with most farmers having (too) small, disjointed meager lots to support larger animals, and the majority having to live out their lives as farm hands.

If we're using medieval "city" references for DF, the one or two dish slop shops would probably fit the public eateries well, but most of the time people ate at home, which dorfs can't do (and you can be quite sure very few food needs would be met by this mode, so one of them would have to yield). The medieval reference breaks down for DF in that some 90% of the population was rural, while DF (at least fortress mode) is basically a "city".

[GoblinCookie]

The solution to this problem is basically simple, restrict likes/dislikes to things that (at a civilization level) the civilization has contact with.  This applies to animals and items too, if the item or creature does not register in any of the biomes that the civilization has a site in, nor any of the sites they are trading with then no likes/dislikes for that thing.  This means that all needs would also be potentially meetable as well, since people would only have a liking for foods in the general vicinity that can be traded with. 

[NW_Kohaku]

The solution to this problem is basically simple, restrict likes/dislikes to things that (at a civilization level) the civilization has contact with.  This applies to animals and items too, if the item or creature does not register in any of the biomes that the civilization has a site in, nor any of the sites they are trading with then no likes/dislikes for that thing.  This means that all needs would also be potentially meetable as well, since people would only have a liking for foods in the general vicinity that can be traded with.

Even this "restricts" the game down to a mere hundred or so food items. 

If I send my herbalists out to forage and gather together the wild fruits and use their seeds for my above-ground farms, I'm going to wind up with dozens of plant types, of which I'm maybe planting half a dozen.  Then there's underground crops for another half dozen.  Then there's maybe a half-dozen animals I can be bothered to seriously ranch for food. 

Meanwhile, if my civilization has access to tropical plants and animals, then there's basically a hundred different plants and animals whose food products I have no realistic access to.  After all, a civilization has access to a far broader stretch of land than just the mountainhome that sends caravans.

No. There needs to be a way of saying that dwarves should not be exactly as likely to crave yellow-bellied warbler meat as they are to like beef.  Right now, dwarves are as likely to enjoy turnip wine (EWW!) as a fine aged single malt whiskey.  There should, frankly, be an acknowledgement that some foods just flat taste better than others unless there is some reason to have such bizzare tastes.  After all, we come from a civilization that has hypothetical access to every kind of animal meat that still exists, but which would you be more interested in eating, a porterhouse with a pale ale, sherry, or coffee to wash it down, or a giant tick's meat and the chance to wash it down with something called "sewer brew"?

A few importable exotic foods might be excusable, but having to keep a grocery list of every single like (of which almost none will be the same or fulfilled within your fortress) that you then have to cross your fingers and pray the elves will bring you a breeding pair lest your fortress crumble because of an unfulfillable need is just broken game design.

There's no rational reason why someone might like cod meat but not respond to halibut when they're basically the same flavor and texture, as is most "white meat" fish.

Using some sort of "grouping" mechanic is the only way to really "future-proof" the game against the fact that DF is inevitably going to just keep adding more and more new creatures as time goes on. 

[JesterHell696]

Dwarves don't really have a system of "peasants" and "kings" like medieval (human) life, though.  They live far more communally. 

I'm fairly sure that dwarves do have nobles and that those nobles do demand better treatment then the rest of the "peasants" and I vaguely remember Toady saying something about making nobles more important to reduce the frequency of "accidents".

The solution to this problem is basically simple, restrict likes/dislikes to things that (at a civilization level) the civilization has contact with.  This applies to animals and items too, if the item or creature does not register in any of the biomes that the civilization has a site in, nor any of the sites they are trading with then no likes/dislikes for that thing.  This means that all needs would also be potentially meetable as well, since people would only have a liking for foods in the general vicinity that can be traded with. 

Given that population are tracked and that migrant are supposed to come from somewhere that exists in the world why not have the game check where the migrants hail from and give them preferences from whats available in their home region and while this my cause discontent in that the player would have to micromanage dwarves preferences when you combine it with NW_Kohaku earlier suggestion of flavors a dwarf would like the flavor of their home and perhaps have a favorite dish in place of a favorite food, I mean Toady did say something about procedurally generated recipes Right?

[PatrikLundell]

You need to bring likes/dislikes down to a manageable level through some system that reduces the number of categories (currently each item is its own category). Basing likes/dislikes on what you're familiar with makes some sense, but you still have to bring the numbers down and the fulfillment chances up, so the two means are not competitors, but complements, fulfilling different purposes. Migrants come as void dwarves, who may or may not be generated with a common background (I don't know, but they often simulate instruments not available to the fortress even when no visitors have come by to turn them to strange tastes), and historical persons, who are restricted to be dwarves: I don't know, however, if all non void migrants come from the mountainhome, or if they may come from any of the civ's settlements (they reasonably can move to the mountainhome and then migrate from there, at the least). Even so, a full range origin based system would mean every petitioner not from the mountainhome would be virtually guaranteed to have unfulfillable needs, and I don't think DF need more reasons for players to dislike visitors.

Recipes would help only if they actually come in a sufficient range to cover most needs (chances are increased with flavors), and if dorfs would wise up enough to actually grab a suitable dish. However, going realistic and move to 1-2 stews would reduce the chances of fulfilling food ingestion needs drastically as even rotating the stews on a daily basis wouldn't do much unless dorfs would eat their meal early if something nice was on offer, since they eat so few times per year, and, even so, it can take days to travel from where the dorf telepathically discovers the dish of the day to the time the canteen is reached (this probably means a weekly, or possibly even bi weekly rotation is more suitable).
Restaurant style where the dorf orders a meal from available recipes that's then prepared would minimize realism, maximize need fulfillment (still abysmal with the current item based system, but decent to good with flavors), and require a drastic increase in the number of cooks, since they'd have to spend time to fetch each ingredient individually for each meal. You might let the tavern perform restaurant services to serve meals that aren't there to sate hunger, but to satisfy needs, so the sustenance would be provided by grabbing raw stuff or a stew. If you're going the restaurant route with food, you might consider drink orders at the tavern as well, i.e. the inn keeper first asking what they want and then grab it, rather than draw something random and then push it down the patron's throat.

[GoblinCookie]

Even this "restricts" the game down to a mere hundred or so food items. 

If I send my herbalists out to forage and gather together the wild fruits and use their seeds for my above-ground farms, I'm going to wind up with dozens of plant types, of which I'm maybe planting half a dozen.  Then there's underground crops for another half dozen.  Then there's maybe a half-dozen animals I can be bothered to seriously ranch for food. 

Meanwhile, if my civilization has access to tropical plants and animals, then there's basically a hundred different plants and animals whose food products I have no realistic access to.  After all, a civilization has access to a far broader stretch of land than just the mountainhome that sends caravans.

No. There needs to be a way of saying that dwarves should not be exactly as likely to crave yellow-bellied warbler meat as they are to like beef.  Right now, dwarves are as likely to enjoy turnip wine (EWW!) as a fine aged single malt whiskey.  There should, frankly, be an acknowledgement that some foods just flat taste better than others unless there is some reason to have such bizzare tastes.  After all, we come from a civilization that has hypothetical access to every kind of animal meat that still exists, but which would you be more interested in eating, a porterhouse with a pale ale, sherry, or coffee to wash it down, or a giant tick's meat and the chance to wash it down with something called "sewer brew"?

A few importable exotic foods might be excusable, but having to keep a grocery list of every single like (of which almost none will be the same or fulfilled within your fortress) that you then have to cross your fingers and pray the elves will bring you a breeding pair lest your fortress crumble because of an unfulfillable need is just broken game design.

There's no rational reason why someone might like cod meat but not respond to halibut when they're basically the same flavor and texture, as is most "white meat" fish.

Using some sort of "grouping" mechanic is the only way to really "future-proof" the game against the fact that DF is inevitably going to just keep adding more and more new creatures as time goes on.

Your whole idea of grouping things by flavour disregards the absence of an objective standard for these things, one person might think that cod and halibut taste the same, while the other person might notice a discernable difference; even more when you consider that we are potentially talking about creatures that are not even basically human in biology.  It is also damn complicated and difficult to implement as a result, the sheer amount of raw work needed to come up with all the different flavour categories and go through all the creatures to add them to the right category.  On top of that there is the interface, the players need to be informed in some way as to which foods belong to which category and so on. 

You need to bring likes/dislikes down to a manageable level through some system that reduces the number of categories (currently each item is its own category). Basing likes/dislikes on what you're familiar with makes some sense, but you still have to bring the numbers down and the fulfillment chances up, so the two means are not competitors, but complements, fulfilling different purposes. Migrants come as void dwarves, who may or may not be generated with a common background (I don't know, but they often simulate instruments not available to the fortress even when no visitors have come by to turn them to strange tastes), and historical persons, who are restricted to be dwarves: I don't know, however, if all non void migrants come from the mountainhome, or if they may come from any of the civ's settlements (they reasonably can move to the mountainhome and then migrate from there, at the least). Even so, a full range origin based system would mean every petitioner not from the mountainhome would be virtually guaranteed to have unfulfillable needs, and I don't think DF need more reasons for players to dislike visitors.

Recipes would help only if they actually come in a sufficient range to cover most needs (chances are increased with flavors), and if dorfs would wise up enough to actually grab a suitable dish. However, going realistic and move to 1-2 stews would reduce the chances of fulfilling food ingestion needs drastically as even rotating the stews on a daily basis wouldn't do much unless dorfs would eat their meal early if something nice was on offer, since they eat so few times per year, and, even so, it can take days to travel from where the dorf telepathically discovers the dish of the day to the time the canteen is reached (this probably means a weekly, or possibly even bi weekly rotation is more suitable).
Restaurant style where the dorf orders a meal from available recipes that's then prepared would minimize realism, maximize need fulfillment (still abysmal with the current item based system, but decent to good with flavors), and require a drastic increase in the number of cooks, since they'd have to spend time to fetch each ingredient individually for each meal. You might let the tavern perform restaurant services to serve meals that aren't there to sate hunger, but to satisfy needs, so the sustenance would be provided by grabbing raw stuff or a stew. If you're going the restaurant route with food, you might consider drink orders at the tavern as well, i.e. the inn keeper first asking what they want and then grab it, rather than draw something random and then push it down the patron's throat.

If we have a properly functioning world economy then these problems will simply go away.  If we get visitors we would simply be able to put in an order to caravan to acquire a certain type of good, who would then be able to buy that good off a third party if they do not produce it themselves.  It should be pricey I know but it is not like our fortresses are not swarming with wealth at the moment. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Your whole idea of grouping things by flavour disregards the absence of an objective standard for these things, one person might think that cod and halibut taste the same, while the other person might notice a discernable difference; even more when you consider that we are potentially talking about creatures that are not even basically human in biology.  It is also damn complicated and difficult to implement as a result, the sheer amount of raw work needed to come up with all the different flavour categories and go through all the creatures to add them to the right category.  On top of that there is the interface, the players need to be informed in some way as to which foods belong to which category and so on. 

Actually, there is a literal school of science around flavor and food, and yes, these things are objectively measurable.  Flavor isn't a set of magical properties, it's chemical reactions to specific chains of hydrocarbons or other chemicals.  For that matter, junk food companies specifically hire food scientists to objectively measure the most addicting snack foods. (For example, Cheetos are designed to dissolve quickly in saliva because that tricks the body into thinking it has "disappearing calories" that triggers a response in the more primitive section of the brain to demand to eat more to compensate for those calories it "lost" when the food shrank, and so make you feel more hungry, or like those snacks have no impact on your appetite.)

Yes, fictional creatures may well have different tastes than what we have, but that would still be based upon the capacity to taste the same chemicals.  The same system of flavor profiles could be used, you just would need to calibrate it so that bitter tastes are more appealing for an herbivore than a mezzocarnivore.

Regardless, even if adding in a simplified set of flavor profiles is not quite realistic, it's far more realistic than what you are proposing or defending, which is people being assigned to favorite foods through blind randomness at birth. A system that has trouble differentiating the flavor of cod from flounder but generally can say both of them are quite dissimilar to bitter melon is a more realistic system than one where all foods are equally dissimilar to one another to the point that a strawberry and soap may as well taste the same so long as it's not the blueberry the dwarf asked for.

[PatrikLundell]

:
If we have a properly functioning world economy then these problems will simply go away.  If we get visitors we would simply be able to put in an order to caravan to acquire a certain type of good, who would then be able to buy that good off a third party if they do not produce it themselves.  It should be pricey I know but it is not like our fortresses are not swarming with wealth at the moment. 

Firstly, a functioning economy is planned, but not scheduled, so we will probably have to make do without for several years before it appears. Even so, it would be a large tedious mess to have to order a hundred different kinds of food (you first have to identify manually), unless there is a system specifically designed to simplify desire sating ordering. Finally, applying the current broken state of the economy to a situation where an economy has been introduced is not a convincing argument, as economy implementation presumably would include value/price balancing as well, not only additional hauling.

[GoblinCookie]

Actually, there is a literal school of science around flavor and food, and yes, these things are objectively measurable.  Flavor isn't a set of magical properties, it's chemical reactions to specific chains of hydrocarbons or other chemicals.  For that matter, junk food companies specifically hire food scientists to objectively measure the most addicting snack foods. (For example, Cheetos are designed to dissolve quickly in saliva because that tricks the body into thinking it has "disappearing calories" that triggers a response in the more primitive section of the brain to demand to eat more to compensate for those calories it "lost" when the food shrank, and so make you feel more hungry, or like those snacks have no impact on your appetite.)

Yes, fictional creatures may well have different tastes than what we have, but that would still be based upon the capacity to taste the same chemicals.  The same system of flavor profiles could be used, you just would need to calibrate it so that bitter tastes are more appealing for an herbivore than a mezzocarnivore.

Regardless, even if adding in a simplified set of flavor profiles is not quite realistic, it's far more realistic than what you are proposing or defending, which is people being assigned to favorite foods through blind randomness at birth. A system that has trouble differentiating the flavor of cod from flounder but generally can say both of them are quite dissimilar to bitter melon is a more realistic system than one where all foods are equally dissimilar to one another to the point that a strawberry and soap may as well taste the same so long as it's not the blueberry the dwarf asked for.

It is not that you are wrong, it is just that your proposed mechanic can presently only be implemented in two ways; one overly complex and the other overly simple.  One way it can be implemented is to classify all the existing food items into arbitrary flavour classes and then add in a semi-happy state by which our cod loving dwarf is semi-happy that at least he could get haddock, that means that we not only have to remember not only the list of items that dwarves want to eat (a mammoth task at the moment) but also what items compensate for the items that I cannot get; that is too complicated.

Alternatively we could simply replace the original system with your system of flavour categories, that would be too simple as it would reduce things to simply making a list of the flavour categories and making sure you have a food item for each of them. 

The functional issue however is that the list of food items is overly randomised, dwarves want to eat items that their civilization has absolutely no access to and despite this they complain about these items absence; also given that every individual has their own random tastes it is impossible to sift out any major groups that all want the same item in order to establish priorities.  With culturally determined tastes, a greater number of dwarves will also like the same items so it is easier to figure out what demands need to be met internally and which less common demands can be met by buying random items from the caravan.  A good way to do this would be to take the present random demands list, hide items that are not culturally available and then randomly select substitutes for the hidden items from the list of culturally available items.  The hidden items can of course be 'discovered' and remain active forever should the creature come into contact with the hidden item that they did not know they liked.

Once this system is in place we can then start to think about your idea about flavour groups, what that would do is when a hidden item is part of a flavour group then the replacement item would be randomly selected from among the culturally available members of that flavour group, *if* there are any.  This means that if cod and haddock are both classified as part of the white fish flavour group but the civilization has access only to haddock then a dwarf that rolled cod would be assigned a like for haddock in addition to their hidden cod demand.

Firstly, a functioning economy is planned, but not scheduled, so we will probably have to make do without for several years before it appears. Even so, it would be a large tedious mess to have to order a hundred different kinds of food (you first have to identify manually), unless there is a system specifically designed to simplify desire sating ordering. Finally, applying the current broken state of the economy to a situation where an economy has been introduced is not a convincing argument, as economy implementation presumably would include value/price balancing as well, not only additional hauling.

You are confusing developed with functional, they are not the same thing.  The rather marginal functional problem with my suggestion is while it works fine for natives, what happens if immigrants arrive from cultures that you are not able to for whatever reason trade with.  All that is needed for this to be fixed however is for us to be able to put in demands to a caravan for items produced not by that civilization but by one of it's trade partners and then adjust the price of the items in the normal manner it presently adjusts prices in accord to specific orders from the player but by a greater degree than it would do if it were able to make those items itself.

There is no need for the caravan arc/world economy in general to have be implemented in order to acquire items from a third party, all that needs to happen is that the script generates a category of third-party items and then increases the price of said items by a given % in the same manner that it already does with items that are in demand.  Since the group that is demanding such foreign items is going to be small, the fortress would likely always be able to afford to buy such items even if the amount of surplus value produced by the fortress was reduced to a more realistic level.  Most people are going to belong to the fortresses culture or one of the immediate neighbouring cultures, so it would be possible to either produce the items in the fortress or to buy then cheaply. 

[PatrikLundell]

While there technically would be no need for an actual economy development to expand trade to cover (transitive) third parties, it's highly unlikely Toady will do so without adjusting the foundation, which effectively means it won't happen until the economy drive. As to the broken economy, you may use the words gravely imbalanced instead, if you like, since you're bathing in wealth after a few years.

It can also be mentioned that there is likely a need to adjust the trade/diplomatic side as well, since it seems trade partners and enemies are locked at embark (or possibly slightly later) and then never changes, resulting in caravans arriving from civs that do no longer have any sites, and wars against civs that likewise no longer have any sites (but still manages to send sieges from the site they did own when the first siege was sent, but then lost to another goblin civ, which collapsed and left the site without owner). You can, of course, set up and lock a trade network at embark time, but, again, I suspect Toady would want to adjust the foundation first.

Regardless of the practical side, I still find a system where a single random item (even if selected from a smaller, theoretically available, pool), provides satisfaction, while nothing else will do to be harsh and unrealistic (DF is a simulation, after all).

[Bumber]

There is no need for the caravan arc/world economy in general to have be implemented in order to acquire items from a third party, all that needs to happen is that the script generates a category of third-party items and then increases the price of said items by a given % in the same manner that it already does with items that are in demand.  Since the group that is demanding such foreign items is going to be small, the fortress would likely always be able to afford to buy such items even if the amount of surplus value produced by the fortress was reduced to a more realistic level.  Most people are going to belong to the fortresses culture or one of the immediate neighbouring cultures, so it would be possible to either produce the items in the fortress or to buy then cheaply.

But who's performing the transaction? Does the player have to remember which items were on the demand screen? Are the dwarves going to buy the items (and with what?)

I suppose the overseer could set aside a coin fund that dwarves buy things with, but then you're just wasting metal. Should the caravan bring coins you can buy for this purpose?

It's easier if we just wait for the economy, which has to come anyway.

[NW_Kohaku]

Alternatively we could simply replace the original system with your system of flavour categories, that would be too simple as it would reduce things to simply making a list of the flavour categories and making sure you have a food item for each of them. 

How is that simple, exactly?

The system we'd been using until now was one that simply required any number of foods greater than one.

Having a system where you need to satisfy, say, 12 types of foods would still be far more complex than any non-DF game uses.  Most games have, at most, three foods and one drink, but now having a "mere" dozen types of needs you have to satisfy for food and drink alone is somehow "too simple"?!

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

There are, in real life, maybe a few dozen categories of food that most people often eat, unless they're going to a fancy place or such.

I don't think a dozen "flavor categories" is that unrealistic. Perhaps have some foods within each category make the dwarf extra happy, for flavor and detail. (pun unintended)

That way, you could keep your depressed king happy by finding him clownfish liver, but most dwarves would be happy with any fish or any liver, etc.