Suggestion:20071213 Food

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20071213 Food

Jon Pyre 17:51, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion type
Major Change, New thing for survivors to worry about

Suggestion scope
Survivors

Suggestion description
I suggest doing something about eating. Food supplies in the city have become scare and now survivors need to find sustenance. Food would be an item that could be found in many places: bars, hotels, clubs, barracks, school and hospital cafeterias, random buildings that have restaurants in their ground floors (some plain buildings would be altered so) and of course mall supermarkets. It is normally found in bulk, say "A box of soup cans" or "A large bag of jerky". It isn't used in your inventory but rather placed in buildings like generators or transmitters. So you might see in a building: "Several boxes of granola bars, a box of canned spinach, a large bag of popcorn have been piled here."

A survivor needs to eat something with every 48AP they spend or they become hungry. Being hungry reduces your maximum HP by 5. Every 48AP you spend without eating reduces your HP by another 5. If there is food in the building you're in you would have an "eat" button. This gets rid of any hunger you have but depletes part of one item of food. So in the building description a "bag of jerky" might become "A mostly full bag of jerky" then "a half empty bag of jerky" then "a mostly empty bag of jerky" then it would vanish.

Basically food would become another public good kind of thing. You could find a bunch of it and stock your safehouse high so other people can focus on killing, barricading and reviving, and eat the bounty you brought to support them. Food wouldn't be too rare that it would be impossible to support a crowded building, and the work of one survivor could feed many people. But it's something that would have to be attended to or people would become weaker.

Now this would bring new elements of strategy in the game. For example, are you better off stocking your food in a crowded safehouse where it'll be rapidly consumed by everyone or sticking with a smaller group so you don't need to search for things to eat that often. Also, are you better off eating every day to remain at full strength or waiting until your health declines a bit before eating. Eating one item ends all your hunger so if you don't expect to be attacked you could wait a few days, let your health go down, and stretch out the same amount of food for longer.

As for search rates, well this would not be even across the board since different buildings would have different rates. Obviously your odds of finding something in a mall with Shopping and Bargain Hunting would be far better than peanuts at a bar. But generally I'd say rates should be set up so that only 1 in 10 people need spend time finding food for everyone. More heavily used buildings like malls would have higher rates to support high populations in that area. Meanwhile the meager snacks you find in a bar far from major population centers might be a surplus for the five or ten people staying there.

Obviously this is a major survivor nerf, but I think would add a new challenge to the game that'd keep things fresh. There would obviously need to be some some sort of buff to counteract this but I think a food system like this is something Kevan should start considering. I think needing to find food to survive is in genre enough to avoid comparisons to the Sims. He should not consider bathing and bathroom, this is different.

• Note: Ransacking a building would destroy all food present. Food cannot be attacked otherwise. Likewise you can not eat in order to destroy food. You can only eat when hungry, so that's one piece of an item a food a maximum of once every 48 AP.
• Note: This health reduction only affects maximum health. If you are below your new maximum health and are hungry you would not lose health. Likewise if you eat you regain all hp lost by being hungry without needing to catch up with a FAK.
• Note: There should be a hunger status in the same area where infection status is displayed. Health should also be display as X/Y if someone is hungry so you can know what somebody's maximum health is.
• Note: Another tactical consideration would be whether to keep all your food in one place or spread it out. You could seed several buildings with supplies so that if one falls your stash of food isn't entirely wiped out. Then again, that gives you more places to guard.

Voting Section

Voting Rules

Votes must be numbered, justified, signed, and timestamped. # justification ~~~~ Votes that do not conform to the above may be struck by any user.

The only valid votes are Keep, Kill, Spam or Dupe. If you wish to abstain from voting, do not vote.

Keep Votes

1. Keep I know food is generally considered to be eaten "off camera" but this is explained flavor wise by a previously non-existant food shortage. It would be an interesting challenge. --Jon Pyre 17:52, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
2. keep Read the title and thought "Oh no!" but this is actually not at all bad.... Would prefer if it was available as bulk items and snack size packs though as i see no reason to force death cultists and other antisocial types to help others just so they can survive! At the very least the option (assumption) that you eat before you throw away would be essential! --Honestmistake 18:45, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
   • Re True. I suppose there can be single serving ones as well as large bulk items. Although antisocials could just eat food that other people put down too. --Jon Pyre 19:16, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
3. Keep Can we eat zombie-flank, too? --Ron Burgundy 19:33, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
4. Keepish - as per honestie, i thought this was going to be awful.. but the strategic elements make it kinda spiffy. and, i have no problem with "forcing" anti-social types tp pull their weight -- it's realistic... if you aren't contributing to the collective good, then you'd better be damn good at surviving as a loner... which is very in-genre, imo. but zombies have to be able to spoil food... ;) but i don't like giving zombies yet another way to waste ap... how's about food is automatically wrecked when a building is ransacked? oh ... will there be any of those cool crunchy indian snacks?? --WanYao 19:35, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
5. Change/Keep - Only, and only if new survivors start with a week's rations food automaticaly.--Seventythree^Talk 20:14, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
   • Re Another detail I didn't think of. Honestmistake suggested having in addition to boxes a few single serving items. New players should start out with several single serving items. --Jon Pyre 20:44, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
6. Keep This seems like an interesting concept, maybe the same should also be done for zombies. --KeroroCanti 15:42, 13 December 2007
7. Keep This is a very good suggestion and I also concur with KeroroCanti's suggestion of including it for zombies. --MikhailA 22:41, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
8. Keep -Helps survivors come together. Add a clause that says you can't buy Boby Building without being sufficiently fed for a certain amount of time. --Heretic144 00:02, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
9. Keep - love it! One of the best suggestions I´ve seen so far. --the wallaby^♥ 14:21, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
10. Take to discussion - I like it but there are a few things that need to be worked out before it could get aproved. Take it to the discussion page.Studoku 16:06, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Kill Votes

1. Kill/Change - My zombie wants to smash food! --Midianian|T|T:S|C:RCS| 18:00, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
2. Kill - Survivors do things to play this game, and enjoy a relative amount of freedom as to what they can do. So do zombies. I don't want to be tied down by restrictions, and punished when I don't follow them. -- SgtBop 18:05, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
   • Re Fair enough. Although you'd never really be tied down. Food would be all over the place. A lone survivor could find enough to feed themselves for several days with only minimal effort. --Jon Pyre 19:20, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
3. Kill - BOO! --/~WOOT~\ 18:30, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
4. Kill Never. Ever. Trever. Lever. Mever. This suggestion sucks. --Happy doodle 18:42, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
5. Kill- If this gets implemented, I can see the next step being that survivors will be forced to search for water, and then heat, then soap so zombies can't smell survivors and before you know it we will need to search for beds in order to gain ap back. No thank you.--Srg Shawn 19:04, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
6. Change - A good suggestion, but inherently flawed. Please remove that clause about affecting maximum health and regaining maximum hp lost after eating blah blah. You get hungry all the time, whether perfectly well, or injured, or near-death. Also, once you starve yourself, you don't regain what body mass you lose by just eating, do you? They simply make the suggestion all the more confusing. Another problem: if beer and wine - mere liquids - can heal 1 HP, what's to stop a bag of jerky from revitalizing you? Say, one more thing, how about triggering hunger every 50 AP (a nice round number) instead of 48 AP? This leaves some overhead for supping once you're back at home base. –Ariedartin ^Talk 21:11, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
   • Re This isn't 100% realistic, naturally, the same way that a person can't fully recover from multiple gunshot wounds with a first-aid kit. I'm not sure what you're suggesting as an alternative to lowering maximum health though. What do you propose? I suppose I could try reworking this so it doesn't lower max health and instead just requires to eat every few days or die. --Jon Pyre 21:35, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
7. Kill - It is more realistic, but I don't find it being fun addition to the game. --Z. slay3r •  Talk  21:42, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
8. Kill - While a good idea at first, your suggestion as is would destroy whole suburbs in less than a week, even with active survivor resistance. The first thing I notice is that this seemingly doesn't relate to zombies at all, although I recall that zombies are living (lol?)beings too, and as such, need sustinence. And yet there's nothing in this suggestion to account for that. The least you could've added in would've been a requirement for zombies to bite a survivor or survivors a specific number of times, or their attack power will weaken or something (seeing as zombies are already "dead", and to die again would be a permanent death). And even then, that's unbalanced and makes zombies nearly invincible, causing them to win wars more often with attrition, not strategy. Furthermore, there are seemingly several suggestions within this suggestion, including but not limited to the idea of storing food inside a safehouse, and allowing other players to eat from it. All in all, this suggestions needs work, and may be too game-altering. --Private Mark 22:15, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
9. Kill - A lot of people complain about survivors concentrating around malls. With food found in malls with highest probability most survivors will turn into mall rats. And speaking about rats - didn't you know survivors sustain themselves with rats? (That's actually in Peer Reviewed.) -- John Rubin^{T! ZG} 22:56, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
10. Kill - I don't want to see survivors whining about encumbrance more, cause they still think it's a stat that actually matters.--Karek^maps?! 23:51, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
11. Change - Almost there. Make it so it can't kill you, just reduce your max AP and HP(40 minimum, reduced by 2; and 25 minimum reduced by 5 sound good???). BoboTalkClown 23:57, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
12. Kill - I want to like this Idea, but I just can't. it would cost too much AP to do boring stuff, even though it does add cool flavor and tactical stuff--Corndoghero^T-S-Z 00:39, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
13. Extra super mega kill - Apologies for missing anything, but you can die from this? Not really out of zombie apocalypse genre, but out of video game genre. I can't recall any game that requires you to eat to live. I don't want to spend the majority of my time eating, unless it was eating zombies or humans and not normal food. I must admit that this is a cool type of idea, but not in this form. (Also, there is at least one vote here that is invalid)--  AHLGTG THE END IS NIGH! 01:00, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
14. Kill - No explanation of why food has all of a sudden been a priority. Zombies should be able to attack food when they enter a building for XP, no different to a piece of ornate glass work. Not in genre, gathering food is not a staple part of the zombie/survivor genre, if you're going to make a case it is I demand that survivors be forced to shit every so often or suffer penalties for constipation. Iscariot 01:11, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
15. Weak Kill- Cool, but I don't want to keep searching for food. --Darth Lumis^{T! A! E! SR} 03:01, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
16. Kill - Presently there are no timed status effects. I can't say I'd like the complication of worrying about them. --Pgunn 04:37, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
17. Kill - 1. Promotes zerging. 2. Reduces a survivors usable AP to 47 per 48 earned. Antitribu 04:51, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
18. Kill - Not fun. --Pdeq 09:15, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
19. Kill - In every game I've ever played that required you to eat food, I've disliked it. Stupid timers I have to worry about all the time instead of playing the game... irritating. I like the concept of "more things to strategize about," but not this. Besides, I have to get up from my computer every few hours to eat, anyway, so it'd be really redundant to *have* to do that in a game. If it filled me up so I didn't have to eat in real life, then maybe I'd vote yes. --Ms.Panes 13:12, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
    • COMMENT I just want to thank all the kill voters. They've raised a lot of good points and given me some things to think about. I want to make this fun, not onerous. --Jon Pyre 14:53, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
20. Kill - I've thought about this for awhile and have decided that I don't really like it. While the concept is interesting, I have to agree with a lot of people above - this would make the game more tedious for survivors. --Ryiis 15:11, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Spam/Dupe Votes

1. A tin of Spam is thrown at you, landing squarely between your eyes. You fall down dead, and can no longer make stupid suggestions. Survivor nerf, and a badly flavoured one. Next, there'll be rules for going poo-poo and pee-pee. Even D&D never went that far! --Funt Solo ^QT 18:49, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
   • Re Nah, that'd be ridiculous. I think we can just assume survivors and zombies poop and pee whenever they want. There's probably a stinking mound in each mall the size of a brontosaurus. --Jon Pyre 19:17, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
2. Poop You will eat my poopie and love it! Omega 21:47, 13 December 2007 (UTC) Invalid vote. And as a side note, I think he should be banned considering that hissy fit he threw over Funt and Bob's vote. >:) -- dǝǝɥs oʇ ɯɐds: sʎɐʍ1ɐ! 02:38, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
3. Spam - Puts survivors at an AP disadvantage. Forces players to spend AP doing mundane, non-entertaining things. In a faster-paced game, that would be OK; but UD is a meant as a concentrated daily fix of zombie goodness, not an immersive virtual life. --Pavluk ^{A! E!} 23:54, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

   Spam - makes the game harder to play for newbies (ooc: Hey don't go messing with D&D!) Prof. Latirus Improperly signed. --Z. slay3r •  Talk  15:45, 14 December 2007 (UTC)