Forced labor

[Wim van de Griendt]

Hello people,

I have an idea. Shouldn't we increase the loss of strength for people who are working and hungry? When you are not working, you do not need as much food as when you are working ( we might want to have different categories for increased loss of strength). We could also make it so that when you are working very hard (you are able to set a sort of working speed) or doing very though work (for example mining), you should loose strength (because it takes 3-4 strength each day and you only get 2 compensated for eating).
What do you think?

Wim

Edited for thread title. -rklenseth

[Genevieve]

I think if you do that, you would have to make it possible to eat regular food to make up for the fact that you are working more OR EAT more food if they are working or walking or whatever.

The biggest problem I personally see with this is that MOST PEOPLE are either working on something or walking somewhere. I certainly only have my characters at rest when I don't have time to come on to check or whatever. I suppose there could be some sort of range for different types of work.

[Cathy Willey]

This might tie into a "resting" project I suggested a while back that produces recovered health - a function of furniture; a bed might give 4%/day, and a chair 2%, or something.

[Genevieve]

I actually like that because from what I can see, there isn't any reason so far for beds and chairs and the like.

[Wim van de Griendt]

I think if you do that, you would have to make it possible to eat regular food to make up for the fact that you are working more OR EAT more food if they are working or walking or whatever.

Genevieve, this is already possible, because people can manually eat extra food (of the kind that gives strength). And then we also have created an extra market for that kind of food (not only for curing 'sick' people).

[ephiroll]

It makes since that if you keep working without food that you loose more strength per day, and I agree that a use should be found for the beds and chairs. All they are good for at the moment is decoration.

[Báng]

Is there ever going to be the possibility of combining foods to make a meal? E.g, potatoes and meat = stew. And this would give the combined health value of both maybe?

[Nick]

I think that since your working speed is slower when you are weak, you dont really need another factor affecting you. Its already bad enough when you are weak and trying to farm some healing foods, getting them at a much slower rate than a healthy character. Although on a related note I think it would be great if you could choose to work harder on something, and perhaps you would eat more regular food a day. Perhaps at a rate that couldnt really give anyone a big advantage, as they would have to work just as hard getting more food for themselves.

[creepyguyinblack]

Maybe make it so that if you wanted to work 10% faster on projects, you'd end up eating 25% more food that day, so it wouldn't be advantageous overly much, but if you really wanted to speed it up, you could.

[Rob Maule]

I think that's a good idea, TJ. It could also apply to travelling. Now there could be a use for travelling speed. Running would have you consume more food (or tire out gradually), and walking slowly would conserve energy, having you eat less food. Great idea.

I have to agree with Nick also. Having your work time increase is punishment enough for having low health.

And combining foods sounds interesting. Perhaps the amount needed to eat in one day and the weight could improve somehow. Maybe by averaging the two (benefit can't be too great, or there'd be no use for single foods).

And relaxing furniture should come around soon. But instead of healing 2% for a chair and 4% for a bed, maybe it could be something like 1.5% and 2%, respectively. There shouldn't be too great a gain. Plus you have healing foods to use, in some places anyway.

[Rob Maule]

Yeah, if you worked harder, you might need to eat more food at the end of the day. I know I'd get hungry after chopping up a tree or running down the road. Though you'd have to eat a lot more food to make the game balanced. I mean, there are towns with huge amounts of food stockpiled. And if they ahve harvesters, they could easily makes steel, weapons, etc. They'd be unstoppable.

On the other hand, healing foods are harder to come by and take longer to gather mass quantities. If, say, running were to lower your strength, it would be better balanced. I think it would be a better sacrifice to lose some of your health. Harder to get too powerful.

But maybe there could be a combination or another sulution to working harder on something.

[Genevieve]

I think that for some areas, this would make having what people have now almost impossible. If it is already hard to come by food (Cantr City for example, other places even more so) and there aren't any healing foods near-by, you are screwed.

[Rob Maule]

But no one said you had to work harder on projects if you weren't able to. In fact, you could slow down and conserve food and energy. You'd just have to find the right balance for each activity.

[Cathy Willey]

Is there ever going to be the possibility of combining foods to make a meal? E.g, potatoes and meat = stew. And this would give the combined health value of both maybe?

I was kind of working on ideas for this at one point - e.g. apples plus sugar plus flour = apple pie, or something. I think all I ever added was cookies. At the time there was no meat, which hampered creativity a little.

[Wim van de Griendt]

I have added a topic where people can submit all their ideas on meals we can introduce in cantr.