Limited Stomach Capacity

[KVZ]

Well, if we set value too high then there would be no big difference if someone eat something different than potatoes daily to save grams how much he can heal. 10% of onions would give 666,6 (well, hellish number) which is in approximation 667 - the same as 50% with boiled eggs. And I thing we should not make this number higher, but rather lower eventually.

[SekoETC]

By char weight, do you mean it would take away from the 15 kilos you can carry, or add to the 60 kilos a person weighs?

Half of the 10 most common healing foods are eaten more than 3319 grams for 50%, while three of those are over 5000 grams. I think the capacity would be likely to be 2000, 3000, 3500 or 4000 and if it's in the high end then it can be balanced with a slower digestion rate, as suggested earlier, so even if you were able to eat say 4000 grams on the first day, you'd only be able to eat 1000 on the following day.

Oh, here's an idea - if a person regularly ate more than what they need, their stomach capacity would rise, and if they didn't eat enough then it would shrink. That way by training one's stomach, a person could reach a potential up to 5000 grams but it would require consuming large amounts each day. Also it could make it show up in their character description as a big stomach. That way the ability to eat vast amounts of healing food wouldn't be something that could be taken for granted but you'd have to work for it.

[Cogliostro]

That's as good a number as any to base all the other carnal calculations on.

Seko: I meant it'd take away from the 15 you can carry, so people couldn't cheat it.

Hahah, I appreciate that expanded stomach/overeating idea, though it should really be shelved for later on IMHO.

What do you think about all the beneficial combat effects of making healing (more correctly: healing food digestion) only happen during the food tick? That would mean you would no longer be an invincible onion-quaffing, clickfesting juggernaut, since noone would be able to quickly get rid of damage they sustained...

(think of this in tandem with that checkbox which enables the "Clash" selfdefense mode) It seems like a lot to implement but they're all fairly simple changes, and might address a majority of the combat problems we have, except stupid dragging strategies and exploits.

[Doug R.]

...maybe with sugary products since sugar does turn into alcohol in the system, or so I've heard.

You have been misinformed.

[SekoETC]

I guess so, Doug, alcohol is more complex than sugar so it would be a bit backwards if it was formed inside the system, but I remember someone used it for an explanation as to why kids go all crazy when they get too much sugar, it's because they're effectively drunk.

In theory it would be interesting if healing only happened on the eating tick, but what it would most likely lead into is people hitting and hiding in buildings, or if someone gets hit then they go hide in a building and only take part in a battle the next day. Although it might lead into people without shelter surrendering if they knew they couldn't survive the next hit. It would be an awfully big change from the characters' perspective so I wouldn't go implementing such a thing, at least in one stage. If healing was going to happen with delay then it would make sense to limit the amount you can heal gradually so that people would get used to the idea of being able to heal less. And limited stomach capacity would do just that.

[Piscator]

Healing only occuring on the food tick seems a bit inflexible. An attack can occur at any time so I think healing should, too. Knowing exactly when everybody regenerates might also open the door for more awkwardnesses in combat. "Let's finish them off before lunchtime" and similar things.

I also realized that limiting the daily healing potential would probably do more harm than good in the current combat set up. Using the common hit&run tactics it's easier for an attacker to cause damage to a defender than the other way round. Limiting the ability to heal would only make this disparity more severe.

edit: Alcohol is actually a good deal less complex than sugar and even if it were, your body is synthesizing complex molecules all the time.
That kinds go crazy when they eat sugar (something I have only ever heard off from American television series, so it might actually be a myth) might have something to do with increased endorphin production or a need to get rid of the excess energy provided by the sugar.

[Doug R.]

edit: Alcohol is actually a good deal less complex than sugar and even if it were, your body is synthesizing complex molecules all the time.
That kinds go crazy when they eat sugar (something I have only ever heard off from American television series, so it might actually be a myth) might have something to do with increased endorphin production or a need to get rid of the excess energy provided by the sugar.

Yes. Glucose, the most basic sugar, is composed of 6 carbons, 12 hydrogens, and 6 oxygens. Ethyl Alcohol is 2 Carbons, 1 oxygen, and 6 hydrogens. It is made by yeast in an oxygen free environment. From each molecule of glucose, you get two molecules of ethanol and 2 molecules of carbon dioxide. Excess glucose makes kids hyper. It's a stimulant, and alcohol is a depressant. Too much glucose causes the pancreas to over produce insulin, which then leads to a glucose crash after a sugar binge, causing fatigue and irritability. But I digress...

[Cogliostro]

Re: Pisc., that won't be the case if the eating revamp is served with a side-dish of "self-defense checkbox" we discussed. I think such a checkbox would definitely be necessary if the healfood is limited.

Let's reimagine the hit and run tactic then:
Victim is hit by Attacker
Victim's self-defense is on - the "Clash" is calculated and both attacker/defender potentially suffer damage. (Victim strikes back as if he is at initial health, not the already decreased one because of the attack)
Victim is attacked by another attacker. Again the "Clash" takes place, except now the victim is at lowered health (due to previous attack).
Both of the attackers then run away into a building/ship.

So this definitely does something to help make tactic less lame (the victim doesn't just stand around like a dummy for punishment just because the player isn't online at the exact time), but of course it can't fix the problem with hit-and-run or stupid dragging strategies completely.

The battlesuits from the other thread would fix it, but only for chars with the suits, which doesn't make sense. Everyone should have the opportunity to play out their normal role during Cantr combats, without silly tactics like the above hit-run/dragging exploits being implicitly the required elements for success, not just the battlesuit characters.

I'm still tending to think of making the "heal tick" (digestion of healing foods in the stomach) occur at some time the players can't accurately predict or know in advance, as something that would considerably improve the tension for players during combat or even encounters with violent animals. If this is possible and not too hard to implement, it lets us avoid that problem you mentioned with players deliberately aligning their activities to a fixed "dinnertime".


Also what if the global healing food digestion "tick" had about a 50% chance of running every day?

[Polt86]

I have also been considering the suggestion of having the timing of all types of ticks be dependent on a per character basis, and not global.

I don't know if it is at all possible with the current system, but it would certainly add some much needed randomness to the game.

Like almost everything, it would also take some considerable forethought.

[Piscator]

This is what I was trying to imply. We shouldn't implement something that makes damage more severe, while the mechanics that apply damage are still quite unfair. Self-defense would help to distribute damage more evenly and according to the comparative fighting strengths instead solely based on initiative.

[Drael]

Shame that wine mead and eggs are more efficient than healing liquids. Ahh cantr food.....

[Snake_byte]

Though this would be better suited somewhere else. I think healing food efficiency should depend on the difficulty to produce and rarity of ingredients, as well as what level of production it is at. Such as grapes being a level one common healing food and grape juice being a level 2 simple, easily made healing food. ect...
So the healing liquids should be stronger. They are rare, must be dried and crushed, then mixed using many machines. They are a rare and complex healing food with many levels to go through.

[SekoETC]

I think RD tries to take that into account. If some processed healing foods were improved further then they might become too effective. Alternatively raw healing foods could be weakened if they seemed out of line, but that would make people complain. If the capacity one can eat in a day will get capped like this suggestion is suggesting then it might become worthwhile to buy or produce healing foods that might not be cost effective but have a high healing rate per gram. It's also kind of silly that eggs are so powerful just because they are gained in such small quantities, and the pace of cooking is artificially low. If cooking time was decreased then efficiency could also be decreased, what would remain the same is gathering rate, which is pretty much random, and that could be fixed by animal domestication or robbing wild birds' nests. People most likely to have eggs are no the ones who hunted the birds but the ones that gather eggs dropped by all the newspawns who don't have pots for cooking, or wood for the fire, or who don't know they could be cooked or simply don't feel like bothering with 10 grams or less. So eggs get stockpiled in some back room and might get sold at an insane price, when the seller has most likely never paid for them or gathered them personally. Also if hunting products deteriorated even while in inventories or indoors, that would prevent unfair stockpiling and benefiting from other people's work. But maybe this is a bit off-topic.

[Cogliostro]

Why would you think that benefitting from other people's "work" is unfair, Seko? I can't for the life of me see anything unfair in making use of what other fools throw away. The Japanese, for example, have entire industry sectors built up around this, by utilizing natural resources and "wastes" that other countries just throw away. They create appropriate processing plants for the resource and turn it into something else, which is then very often resold at insane price to those same countries that threw away the original resource!

[Cogliostro]

Back on topic, so we've seen so far that limited stomachs are a good idea, if they come with a self-defense checkbox implementation. Also it's been suggested that the healing-food-digestion tick can be either global and have a random chance of running each day, or private per character and random too. Either way, it would have the effect that after filling your belly with some healing food, you have to wait a while for its medicinal effects to kick in and heal you, and you never know exactly when it's going to.

Is this a realistic thing to be talking about, coding wise? This randomization of the heal-food-digestion tick?