Hey everyone!
This week, we want to share with you some further depth into our thoughts regarding food.
As you will remember from last week, my testing made me realise that the food dynamic at the moment was rather badly balanced. With just 4 fields, I was able to sustain a population of 70 villagers, and that seemed like too many villagers for so few fields. We had been thinking about making the food mechanic more interesting for a while, so with last week’s decision to also change balancing, we’ve decided to make some changes:
The first change we want to make is to make food a requirement for the commander. With the introduction of health in one of the recent updates, the commander can consume food from his inventory in order to regain health, but we had decided not to make the food a “survival” requirement at the time. We want to change this now, so the commander uses a unit of food each minute, just like the villagers, which will either recover health if it is available, or “damage” health if it is not.
Further, we want to rebalance the existing food production toward being a little more involved while providing a little less for each step. As a result, we will reduce the amount of food produced per field, but with fields being cheaper. We will likely add some variation to the fields, so choosing to plant tomatoes over potatoes will lead to a quicker harvest but with a smaller payoff (both yielding basic vegetables), etc.
(The new mechanic will add the commander to the regular food consumers, and will introduce the optional kitchen for food refinement)
Adding to this change, we also want to introduce an additional mechanic with “cooking”. In particular, this will allow players to combine the “base” food of fruit, vegetables, meat, and grains in various recipes to create meals. We will need to balance this once we’ve implemented it, but we are thinking that these meals could last longer, and/or provide more health recovery, and/or provide distinct advantages (e.g. faster construction speed when eaten). This will also provide further ‘flavour’ for exploration with the possibility of finding recipes and new foods to better advance through the game.
Until next week!