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[GoblinCookie]

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.

At the moment you just buy as many kinds of foods as possible which is basically realistic, you do not have to keep track of the needs of every individual dwarf presently; the problem is they sometimes want things that cannot be acquired at all.  The issue is with the small minority which come from very exotic places, they are a small enough group to keep track of; you basically try and acquire as many types of food as possible, much as at the moment. 

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"?!

Since there are only ultimately a few basic food categories, it will basically be a doddle to simply grow the easiest food from each category and away we go.  This rather stifles the whole economic development angle in regards to food, but it does make the game easier I will admit as long as players are told what foods belong in what category. 

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

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"?!

Since there are only ultimately a few basic food categories, it will basically be a doddle to simply grow the easiest food from each category and away we go.  This rather stifles the whole economic development angle in regards to food, but it does make the game easier I will admit as long as players are told what foods belong in what category. 

Solution: Have a modifier for food that makes them happier dependent on the value of the food. This could be dependent on the "luxury" trait of the dwarf or whatever. Nobles could require more "expensive" foods. Expense is determined by supply and demand; harder to get foods, as well as more "popular" foods, cost more and lead to more happiness.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The astute reader will notice that a crude, hardcoded version of this is already in effect. Some plants and dyes that exist in remote, special places are worth more, and lead to more happiness. Therefore, even if nothing else is changed, GoblinCookie's "problematic simplicity" would not occur.

[GoblinCookie]

Solution: Have a modifier for food that makes them happier dependent on the value of the food. This could be dependent on the "luxury" trait of the dwarf or whatever. Nobles could require more "expensive" foods. Expense is determined by supply and demand; harder to get foods, as well as more "popular" foods, cost more and lead to more happiness.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The astute reader will notice that a crude, hardcoded version of this is already in effect. Some plants and dyes that exist in remote, special places are worth more, and lead to more happiness. Therefore, even if nothing else is changed, GoblinCookie's "problematic simplicity" would not occur.

It is a solution that makes practically no sense and it is also hugely simple; buy lots of the most valuable food possible as opposed to actually trying to deliver a varied diet, all problems solved.

Just because a food is valuable does not mean that the food is going to be eaten or liked; though being liked might increase the price, perhaps. 

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

You cannot refute an argument by dissecting it and noticing how each part does not work on its own! They're not supposed to work on their own! 

There are three parts to food happiness: variety, preference, and luxury/price. I might think this $100 food tastes better than a $10 food, just because I expect to get more happiness from the spending more. I also would prefer not to eat that same $100 food over and over and over again for a year. I would also like this $100 almond mix over this $100 pecan mix, because I like almonds in particular.

They work together. They will be implemented together. So look at them together, okay? They support each other.

Spoiler: also (click to show/hide)

GoblinCookie, I said a modifier. That is, there is already a system set up for food happiness; this just modifies it.

[PatrikLundell]

I DON'T buy every kind of food and don't want to, since I'm already fighting an uphill battle with over production. And yes, people report horse piss from a really expensive wine bottle tastes better than the same horse piss from a cheap one. Dwarves, however, are not humans, and do not necessarily use the same "rather poor but better than my neighbor, than both me and my neighbor richer but equal" logic most humans use (dwarven nobles apparently aspire to humanity in this respect).
Different people (and dwarves) have differing opinion about novelties. Some seek it, and some refuse to try something unfamiliar. If you wanted variety to work for all dwarves you'd have to have them like enough different things that you could provide variety by switching between them.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Well...

1. They'd be fine with non preferred food.

2. They'd have their wants for novelty adjusted by their traits.

[NW_Kohaku]

There is, however, the fact that domestic livestock and widely cultivated crops tend to taste the way humans like most because they've been bred to be tasty. 

Corn was originally basically like wheat, but they were bred to go from having a half-dozen kernels to having a hundred on a cob by first Native Americans and then the later Americans.  Corn is also bred into breeds for having high sugar content (high fructose corn syrup), thick-kerneled corn (popcorn), corn high in specific oils for use in vegetable oils, industrial lubricants, and plenty more. 

Pigs, meanwhile, have gone anywhere from having over half their body mass being lard, in the times before vegetable oil was popular and it was the way to grease your pans and keep oil in your lamps, to more modern extremely lean pigs for the most pork chop to the animal and a chance to say that pork is "lean" and "heart-healthy". Meanwhile, there are people trying to breed the pig back into having a "proper marbling" by adding a certain amount of fat back in.

This game's concept of "wild strawberries" is rather ahistoric - strawberries were basically useless to farmers until the invention of the greenhouse, because strawberries were evolved to attract small birds that liked tiny berries the size of one of the bumps on a blackberry.  So long as those birds were better spreaders of strawberry seeds than humans, there was no chance of breeding them into berries half the size of an average person's fist you see today.  Only after humans built greenhouses did we manage to keep birds out and grow strawberries to our liking.

Basically, there's much greater reason for people to prefer something that is domesticated and grown in bulk and bred for the flavor they produce. Wild meat is often too lean and tough.

Now, with that said, yes, these are non-humans.  I'd be willing to say that it could make sense to make different species prefer different things.  (Humans crave meat, sugary fruit, salt, and fat because those things have historically been rare.  Elves might not care so much about the sugar, however, since they have plentiful access to fruit throughout their whole history in existence, while they might need some nutrients from meat they can only rarely get out of "self defense".)

Beyond that, if 12 types of food is "a doddle", then we could just make it 18 types of food/drink. 

That said, I don't think it's terribly necessary to add that much complexity to the supply lines.  Honestly, I don't think I had much more than 12 regularly produced food items in any of my previous forts. 

I should also say that there are native people who live around the arctic circle who subsist on diets almost entirely composed of marine mammals and reindeer cheese. Even saying that you need to "merely" supply 12 types of food is likely enough to invalidate tundra play.  (Or at least, force culling of any dwarf that doesn't prefer blubbery meat or cheese.)

There isn't really that much "challenge" added by forcing players to cater to an overly large number of foodstuffs.  It just invalidates any style of play that isn't a trade hub, which shouldn't be a goal.

To go back a second to the flavor profiles idea, one thing that does is allow cooking with extremely flavored ingredients to balance out a flavor profile, and hit a target flavor without necessarily dictating a particular type of food.  That is, if a dwarf really likes sweet things, you can either give them fruit, or if you have tons of eggs and meat but no surface fruits, you might just marinate their steak in tons of dwarven syrup to sweeten their meat enough for them to like it. 

Provided flavor profiles is made in conjunction with cooking rewrites, you could introduce spices that do not serve as direct nutrition, but simply alter the flavor profile, (or maybe cause minor beneficial syndromes in the case of some herbs and spices, like ginger,) so that you can push a food from one flavor category into another.  That would keep the flexibility of diet while still satisfying a need for some form of diversity of diet.

[PatrikLundell]

To counter a number of NW_Kohaku's points:
- Corn is domesticated from a kind of grass just like wheat, but not wheat itself. I believe them to be rather distantly related, since they use different metabolisms, if I remember correctly (C4 for corn and C3 for wheat and most other grass based crops). I don't disagree with the rest, however.
- You greatly exaggerate the limited size of wild strawberries. They're a bit bigger than blueberries (real ones, not the domesticated monster berries), at a guess about 7 mm diameter, and kids frequently collect them on wild grass straws (I certainly have done so). I agree they wouldn't be a major food source, but given the opportunity, they'd definitely be picked. They wouldn't have been farmed on great fields (and nor would blueberries have been), but picked wild. Ironically, wild strawberries are farmed nowadays. Domesticated strawberries do not require greenhouses and are widely grown on open farm plots (a "recent", i.e. last generation or two, innovation is to get the customers to pick the berries themselves, and pay as they leave). I would expect domesticated strawberry growing to have a reasonably long history, but I don't know if it's just a few hundred years, or all the way back to 1400.
- I can't say I've heard of any peoples living of reindeer milk -> cheese. The (semi) nomadic peoples that herd reindeer certainly use reindeer for a lot of things, but milking is not one of them, as far as I know (and I believe these peoples are lactose intolerant to a large extent, having never had any reason to adapt to milk usage). The reindeer mainly run free and are rounded up only at a few times of the year. The animals are also herded between the summer and the winter grazing grounds, of course. Eskimos largely depended on marine mammals and fish, with reindeer if available (which should be in only limited areas), possibly polar bear occasionally, and, in suitable locales, small amounts of wild greenery (I would expect blueberries to grow at the southern tip of Greenland, for instance).
- I agree forcing players to trade or suffer wide spread dissatisfaction would be bad. I'd like trade to make it possible to elevate satisfaction from an "OK" level, but it shouldn't be the part of the base line requirements. Now, starting scenarios may obviously include cases where not trading is just stupid (a non trading trade outpost?), and different scenarios could have different demand profiles: settlers in a harsh land or prisoners should have different "basic" requirements than customers at a luxury resort for the rich.
- Flavors have the potential to make something with limited resources, especially if spices and seasoning are available to modify recipes. However, I don't want DF to become Restaurant Simulator, so these things need to be possible to set up with a limited effort and then largely run on their own.

[NW_Kohaku]

Alright...
* I meant that pre-domesticated corn would visually/structurally resemble the sorts of grasses from which wheat was domesticated, not a direct descendant. I.E. their seeds were small knots of kernels not dissimilar to wheat seed, not giant cobbs.

* Strawberries were not successfully bred until the 18th century.  It's not that people hadn't tried, but that they had little success in breeding without keeping the birds that would pick them out of their gardens. Once strawberries were bred to be large enough not to be attractive to small birds, you could grow them outside, since small birds couldn't have more control over their spread and breeding than the farmers. Breeding new varieties takes place in greenhouses because that's how you can gain absolute control over what breeds with what. 

Modern wild strawberries in North America are also more likely at least partially interbred with larger South American varieties, both of which were larger than European varieties.

* You're assuming Eskimos when I talk about reindeer herding, the Sami people of what is now Northern Finland made reindeer cheese.

* Starting scenarios should still allow the player to choose something like attempting to claw out a living on the tundra or on an island with no direct trade contact with the rest of the world. (If dwarves are on the brink of extinction, there may even be perfectly rational reason to hide.)  Demanding trade may doom some fortresses which are at war with other races, or where other races may already be extinct in pocket worlds. Keep in mind that dwarves are natively only going to eat underground crops, and only player dwarves domesticate wide ranges of surface animals or grow surface crops.  If not having large quantities of surface food dooms your fortress, then worldgen dwarves are doomed, as well.

* The part about running on their own is, of course, perfectly reasonable.  I'd suggest a system similar to what I suggested in the agriculture thread. That is, you could set targets, and the game could run some permutations of recipes that could fit the target.  (It would still require constant supply of the needed ingredients, however.)

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

...actually, PatrikLundell is right in that worldgen fortresses do tend to have much variety in food.

Dwarven traders bring many above-ground fruits and crops and meats.

[PatrikLundell]

- I readily agree corn and wheat originally come from basically similar looking kinds of grasses.
- Reindeer herding: No, as far as I know Eskimos have not herded reindeer (and I don't think any other Amerinds have either), but presumably hunted them when opportunities were present (not too often, I think, given that Eskimos largely live in areas where reindeer wouldn't find any food or be able to get to (I don't believe the ice free parts of Greenland have any reindeer on them, but I may be wrong)). I also have to admit I don't know how far in on the north American mainland the Amerinds are called Eskimos). Various peoples across northernmost Asia and Europe have traditionally herded reindeer, and these peoples may or may not be related to each other. I stand corrected (and, I admit, somewhat surprised) when I thought the Sami didn't (in the past, apparently) milk their reindeer for cheese making, however.
- I think we're on the same page regarding trade requirements. My comment was intended to be read that a small number of specific starting scenarios based on the premise of trade, should expect trade as the baseline (but it should still not be impossible to have a trade outpost that doesn't trade [perhaps due to war or collapse of the mountainhome] and still manage to cling to existence and renew the civilization). Most of the starting scenarios should be trade agnostic, however, and I wouldn't cry if all of them were. Every embark I've made have allowed me to bring at least some surface crops, so while all dwarves should have access to all subterranean crops, most also get access to some surface crops available to their civ (I assume it's based on the mountainhome's biome). Likewise, dwarves seem to have access to a set of domesticated surface animals, and I don't think I've seen any variation in that set. Now, crops from the mountainhome aren't of much use beyond their immediate use as food if you can't grow them in your embark, but if you chose to embark in an area that doesn't support surface farming (or a barren desert and don't/can't trade) it's a decision the player has control over. Again, that shouldn't doom the fortress.
- I agree it falls on the overseer to ensure sufficient resources of various kinds are acquired by the fortress.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

i am not trying to argue against anyone in this post; I am just adding my thoughts.

If the player expends a small amount of effort, they are easily able to have at least twelve specific types of foods. There's the subterranean crops: plump helmets, dwarven wine, dwarven ale, quarry bush leaves, rock nut paste, rock nut pressed cake, rock nut oil, dwarven rum, dwarven syrup, dwarven sugar, dwarven wheat flour, and dwarven beer. Then there's all the different organs one can get from just one or two animals (think of liver and lungs and heart and sweetbread). Then there's fishing, plant gathering, aboveground crops, eggs...

With just two or three of these options, players can satisfy the "twelve foods" requirement pretty easily. And the point is that this minimum is just a minimum requirement for adequate happiness. If sieges keep that from happening - all the better. Then siege-waiting-out would lead to problems like it's supposed to. Sieges are only broken because "the ultimate defense" equals "cask of montadillo", and it has very few negative effects.

Well, that and broken AI.

[PatrikLundell]

i am not trying to argue against anyone in this post; I am just adding my thoughts.

If the player expends a small amount of effort, they are easily able to have at least twelve specific types of foods. There's the subterranean crops: plump helmets, dwarven wine, dwarven ale, quarry bush leaves, rock nut paste, rock nut pressed cake, rock nut oil, dwarven rum, dwarven syrup, dwarven sugar, dwarven wheat flour, and dwarven beer. Then there's all the different organs one can get from just one or two animals (think of liver and lungs and heart and sweetbread). Then there's fishing, plant gathering, aboveground crops, eggs...

With just two or three of these options, players can satisfy the "twelve foods" requirement pretty easily. And the point is that this minimum is just a minimum requirement for adequate happiness. If sieges keep that from happening - all the better. Then siege-waiting-out would lead to problems like it's supposed to. Sieges are only broken because "the ultimate defense" equals "cask of montadillo", and it has very few negative effects.

Well, that and broken AI.

Only provided these individual items cover all the "12" categories, not just any random assortment of "12" different items. If all rock nut products are similar enough in taste, they may all fall within a single category. Likewise, sheep liver, dog liver, and cat liver may also satisfy the same category. Many embarks do not support fishing (I've been in desperate runs to get shells for a mood, only to find all the murky pools at the surface were dead, as was the cavern lake).

Thus, to cover the different flavor categories, you'd probably need fish, red meat, white meat, booze, subsurface plants, fruit (possibly satisfied by dwarven syrup as a sweet substitute), probably surface plants, and round things out with different categories within these (meat and liver are probably different, for instance).
A fully subterranean fortress should be viable, and although the dorfs might not be happy, they shouldn't be prepared to riot either. A plump helmet only based fortress, however, should have a rather grumpy base level, without much setback needed to get it to explode unless serious efforts were made to compensate on other levels.

[NW_Kohaku]

Dwarves bring surface fruits now?  I've only played one fort since they were added, so my memory may not be the best, but I thought that was the elves' new thing...

Anyway, the problem is in the long-term: Needs are now something that have to be satisfied or else dwarves start becoming "distracted", which screws up their work schedule the way that a vampire without blood slows down.  That means you can go a year or three without satisfying the need for the exact thing they want, but you're going to have to supply them sooner or later, or they all just go on strike because they're jonesing for raven or panda or something.

I'm not sure that's necessarily tied to rioting, as I think the new needs system helps migrate away from "tantrum spiral" stuff, although it also neuters the power of truly epic dining halls and lots of happy engravings as a means of keeping morale "ecstatic" at all times.

Also, to back up PatrikLundell's comment, I'd suspect dwarven rum, sugar, and syrup would all taste basically the same since they're all the same plant.  Alcohols all generally taste the same as the juice they're made from, and the juice is dwarven syrup, or, when dried out, dwarven sugar. Dwarven wine is probably just the same as plump helmet, just a bit sweeter, going by a report by someone in the forums who apparently made mushroom wine to test it.  (Surprisingly, he said it wasn't bad, and was actually fairly sweet, although it took a lot of mushrooms to make a decent amount of juice.)

Sweet pods are probably a lot like sugar beets, just really, really sweet and maybe a little other flavor on the side.  I'd also suspect cave wheat is basically just albino underground versions of regular wheat. Quarry bushes are weird, but my best guess, based upon what you can do with it, is that they're like a peanut plant with edible leaves.

[Bumber]

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.

At the moment you just buy as many kinds of foods as possible which is basically realistic, you do not have to keep track of the needs of every individual dwarf presently; the problem is they sometimes want things that cannot be acquired at all.  The issue is with the small minority which come from very exotic places, they are a small enough group to keep track of; you basically try and acquire as many types of food as possible, much as at the moment.

Well, I don't. It's too much effort to select it all, isn't sold in large enough quantities, takes up additional stockpile space, builds up inedible/unusable seeds (which then tie up bags,) only pleases part of the fort, is likely to be eaten first by people who don't even like it, and is not sought out by dwarves when cooked into a prepared meal.

As it stands, I try to cater to my most stress-vulnerable dwarves, and the rest can just eat what we hunt/grow (which my stockpiles already overflow with.) If I were using DFHack (dwarfmonitor), I might try to acquire the foods that the greatest number of dwarves had preference for.
Why can't they just be satisfied with their masterwork roasts? Eating your most favorite food in the whole world is a luxury (good thought,) not a basic need. It's not even on my mind if I haven't had chicken marsala in over a year. Cheeseburgers are fine.