FreeOrion

Elsethread, I see that "food" is being eliminated (at least as an experiment).

Has that become a hard-and-fast decision?

If it has not, I'd like to ask that it be reconsidered. I'd like to keep "food" as a strategic resource. It's a quite fundamental strategic concept, and I think it'd be a mistake to eliminate it -- particularly if you plan to implement "trade"!

Instead of eliminating it, I'd argue for increasing the role of food; in particular, I'd like to see a "food wheel" based on the "habitibility wheel" - races preferentially eat food from a planet of their preferred habitat, and can ONLY eat food from an adjacent space on the wheel; lack of "adequate" food might be one of the causative factors of rebellion, exchanges of types-of-food to keep subject populations happy could be foundations of alliances, etc, etc, etc...


- Steve

We're 80-90% of the way through making the complicated transition away from the old food resource. There's not a lot that could prevent us from finishing that off. Then people can try it and we will see if it stinks or not.

As a general comment, complaining about a change without bothering to find out why the change was made, and exactly what was changed probably isn't going to get you very far. I know it is complicated and a pain getting (and staying) up to date with the development this project-- but if you want to participate in the planning, there's really no substitute.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

Oh, I don't think it'll "stink." I just don't think it'll be *as* good; particularly not as good as making food into a genuine strategic resource, instead; where taking a "breadbasket" planet or two could be a telling blow, in the long term, a strategic commodity for trade, war, etc, etc. I mean, FO wants a _strategy_ game, and "food" is a pretty fundamental strategic element.

Honestly, I'm expecting it would be a total re-work of the existing "food" concept (rather, the food code -- conceptually, food is pretty straightforward ), so I don't see the current project (to take OUT the existing "food" resource) as being off-target for the "food is MORE important" idea...


Sorry, I didn't mean to complain! I'm not sure I even disagree with the FO devteam decision... food, as-implemented, doesn't necessarily make for better game-play; it's a pretty-easy-to-achieve number you just need to keep high enough to feed your empire; I guess it gets a temporary/local boost in importance if you take a system that isn't supply-connected to the rest of your empire, and needs to be self-sufficient until it connects... It's certainly worth "eliminating" food, at least to see how it plays!

I'm running the (most-recent, I think) .exe dowload [SVN 4635], and what happened was a moment of saying, "wait a minute, what do I MEAN, 'I have plenty of food'???!?" I had just taken a planet with a new-to-my-empire race, and I realized (as I considered setting them to IIRC a research-focus) that I had no other... erm, gas-giant, iirc... dwellers, so "in theory" my existing foodstuffs wouldn't feed this race. This led me, fairly directly, to the ideas I mentioned above: per-species food preferences, differentiated food as strategic resource(s), etc...

I had previously noticed the conversation about removing food, rolling it into a general "health" meter, etc. Didn't follow the whole conversation, as my reaction then was "huh... OK, well I guess I can see 'food' as a component of the overall 'health' issue... not necessarily what I would have thought of, but then again I haven't been thinking/coding/testing FO for the last several YEARS, either!" So I didn't bother commenting: I had no substantive disagreement, not even any meaningful commentary that could add to the discussion. I guess I'll go read that discussion now, eh? Foot already in mouth & all that ...


- Steve