Company provisions

[Kruczysko]

Hello,
I thought about that for some time and it would be cool if there was some kind of benefit to buying more expensive provisions than the cheapest one, maybe in form of morale boost or even small fatigue bonus (after all army marches on its stomach). What do you think about that?

[Mike]

+1

Makes perfect sense that brothers would be happier with high-quality food and booze, and some of them – like the adventurous noble – would flat-out refuse to eat stuff like unidentifiable meat scavenged from dead orks.

I would very much like to see that idea incorporated in a wider camping and company-management expansion, where you could meddle with the size of rations, allowance of alcohol, etc. I’m a little concerned though that some players might find such level of micro-management unwelcome…

[Junell]

The more expensive rations is more durable than the low cost ones, so they are already more beneficial. That said I absolutely agree that the quality of the food should influence the company. As there is already a morale system in place, this would be the natural place to integrate it.

Maybe add a value to each type of food in the inventory, low for simple food like grain and fish, and high for luxury food. If the total value of your food is lower than X, then morale penalty occurs. If it is higher than Y, then a morale bonus takes effect.

Then you could get the similar effect of stocking up on lots of different low grade foods, or spend some money on a few valuable luxury foods. It would also give the option of letting grains, as an example, last long before getting spoiled, even if it’s cheap. It just don’t give much bonus to morale.

[spamtaboo]

+1 Suggested previously to make a system at least as simple as in Mount and Blade.

[SuperCaffeineDude]

I think every good should have be marked on by
Taste: The happiness it provides your men |&| Nutrition: A stamina buff
So alcohol is negative nutrition, but is worth the mood boost, whilst grain alone provides negative enjoyment but adds nutrition

And maybe some means of dictating which goods are for eating would also help for trading perishables, and swearing off ork bush-tucker.
I would also love for food longevity of alcohol and dried foods to keep a bit longer, with more perishable foods offering both better enjoyment and nutrition than say; grog and gruel

[Wargasm]

A possible problem with this idea is that the actual cost of provisions varies depending on how available it already is in the given locale (although, having said this, I think every item has a fixed “worth” that’s shown for reference). Still, I don’t think that every character should mindlessly become happier or sadder depending on the base “worth” of a provision. As we know, a more rare and expensive weapon isn’t always a genuine upgrade on cheaper and more common alternatives.

Also, the nutritive benefit of various foods can truly depend on how they’re prepared etc. Grains, for example, actually have various anti-nutritive properties (e.g. phytic acid) which can be diminished (thus increasing the nutritive benefit) by certain processing methods. But those anti-nutritive properties wouldn’t matter much if there were other items in the diet (e.g. cheese, venison) that over-compensated with an abundance of the affected nutrients (i.e. the nutritive value of one provision would really be relative to the availability of others).

But what if a character had coeliac disease or a dairy allergy? OMG …

Things like cheese and venison would have a high nutritive value generally, but they don’t have any carbs, and it would be difficult to keep running up hill hitting people on the head and forming shieldwalls without any carbs at all (so, again, the potential benefit of some provisions would be relative to the availability of others).

How high in alcohol are beer and mead? If they’re only super-low in alcohol, like most medieval ale, they might steadily enhance mood and resolve without having any anti-nutritive effect. Also, traditionally produced beer is likely to have a reasonable quantity of some B vitamins and thus might be of quite decent nutritive value.

[SuperCaffeineDude]

I think nutrition was the wrong word on my part I was more thinking of a broad combination of energy and nutritional properties adding to the score, so grain as a cheap high sustenance food, meat as a better tasting more expensive alternative, with roots and berries as low sustenance, etc. With some sort of multiplier for variety, and paired each foods longevity and price, it could lead to an interesting meta. Something like this maybe…

I was also thinking if there was an overhead to the emotional state of a company, how well they are provisioned, the losses they’ve suffered, etc, it might be easier to summarize this information from fewer variables.

[Author]

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