Food Mechanics

[leeor_net]

I originally posted this as a reply to: https://forum.outpost2.net/index.php/topic,5833.msg83324.html#msg83324 but found it makes more sense as a separate topic.


Welp, I've begun some basic work on the population model now and something occurred to me. In the original game if you ran out of food your colonists would effectively die one at a time. With OutpostHD's code so far, basically if you run out of food they all die in one shot.

As much as this sucks it comes down to one simple fact -- a turn equates to roughly 4 weeks or one month. Humans can survive without food for no more than 3 weeks. So it's realistic. It's led me to a conclusion though:

It takes 17 turns to get the first Agricultural dome up on what I will call 'hard' mode in the current build of the game. Because you have to have a functioning CHAP facility for the agridome's to work it doesn't matter if you build the dome first or the chap first, either way the soonest you're going to get an agridome operational is 17 turns (easier modes which provide higher initial resources can probably be done sooner).

So I'm thinking that the bare minimum amount of supplied food at the beginning of the game should be between 170 - 200 units (each unit of food feeds 10 colonists per turn) which means with 100 colonists you need to have at least 10 units of food at the beginning of a turn.

I have a feeling some balancing will need to come of this but I'll say just play testing this particular scenario and knowing that I'm quickly running out of food gave me an extreme sense of urgency.

I'm also wondering if difficulty should affect the starvation rate. If you run out of food, does the entire population die or do they die at different rates? E.g., on easy mode should it be that only half the population dies for each turn there is no food? Or maybe only a quarter?

Thoughts?

[UtopiaPlanetia]

Should cannibalism be allowed?

[Hooman]

Lol, I was just going to say that.

Cannibalism. Makes sense to me. If survival of the race is at stake, I don't see why not. It's all just meat. How long do you think one human body would last feeding other people?

[leeor_net]

Hehehe... imagine that AI computer personality from the first game: "Commander... the people are eating eachother!"

Would be enough to get one person through a month or 10 people through a couple of weeks leaving them alive after a month but in a severely weakened state. BUT.... you have to think, if someone died due to starvation there isn't going to be much nutrition left in their body so eating it may not be helpful at all. Maybe for one person (I can think of the heart, kidneys and brain being some source of nutrition but it wouldn't last very long at all especially with no or very little muscle mass).

I chatted with Dave about it on IRC last night and he suggested rationing... That was my first thought but I wasn't sure how to go about it until I thought it out a bit. Basically it would just be a modifier, e.g., 1 unit of food can now feed 20 people for a turn but there is a steep morale penalty and the health goes down a lot so you're more and more likely to die. I just need to think about what the rules are in terms of rationing and how much it can be extended. Would at least extend how long colonists survive for a couple of turns before it's game over.

[Goof]

If they managed to travel through space, I think that they have found a way to "recycle" organic tissues into a thing that would have been useful.
And appears less barbarian than cannibalism.
More like the  "Water World" point of view.

Cannibalism, as eating directly human flesh (cooked or not), would be at the end in the list of options in case of hunger issues.

After all, nature does "cannibalism" for us (with big air quotes).
Our world is defined, and despite what we throw in space, his mass doesn't vary so much.
Virtually, there's non reason a cell that is part of a beef, butterfly, flower, whatever wasn't composed by raw materials that would have composed another human being.
There is just a larger scale of time, and a bunch of transformations.

« Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme »
« Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed »
Antoine Lavoisier (French too)

[leeor_net]

You'd think that but looking at the original story, humans scrambled to cobble together a ship based on only the most recent technologies. They barely made it off Earth. I have a feeling they wouldn't have had time to come up with such a technology.

[Hooman]

Honestly now, who did the research into effective ways to cannibalize someone? And how on Earth/New Terra did the study make it past an ethics review board? Oh..., test subjects. Right.

[UtopiaPlanetia]

Soylent Green

[Hooman]

Hah, nice. I may have to watch that.

Soylent Green

[leeor_net]

* leeor_net shudders

Blech

Then again... in a desperate situation...

[Hooman]

Don't knock it until you've tried it.

[leeor_net]

So basically what I ended up running with is a base rate of 0.50. E.g., if you have 100 colonists and only 9 units of food, instead of 10 colonists dying, only 5 do. The idea is that food units are spread out across the colonists. It also gives the player a chance to recover from a colony collapse.

On that note, the 0.50 modifier is just the base, for basically 'normal' mode. An additional modifier would be applied based on difficulty level. Something to tweak for sure.