a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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But you can still get powerful yum chains with good food, why not make and distribute whole and skim milk instead of popcorn? Whole and skim milk, berry and berry bowl, stew, rabbit and mutton pies, these are all foods that exceed beams, corn and carrots by a gigantic margin.
Your post is about delivering food for yum, i think that can be done efficiently when you use good foods, like milk or, as you mentioned, stew. You explicitely stated in it that chaining with green beams is optimizing. That absolutely is not true because: 1 there are many better alternatives for yum with cheaper cost and 2 it's better to not yum at all and eat pies until you have 6 people at 17+ yum eating green beams. Raw corn is even worse than beams at 20 food for the same costs intead of 24. I understand RPing into eating more foods, i understand that stacking yum bonuses feel pretty good, but unsurprisingly, bad foods are still bad with yum.
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as always, everyone is undervaluing time and labor, and also, just trying to enjoy the game. The idea is definitely not that we eat the same thing all the time and have no food variety.
The bonus and having to eat less frequently are worthwhile. Also, at least some of us don't want to wait til we're at a couple of pips to eat. I remain convinced this is why so many people die of starvation with so much food around.
Actually, the reason why people are pointing toward a few high effiency staple foods is BECAUSE they value time a labour costs. It takes significantly less dirt and water to produce 100 pips of food by making meat pies then by making green beans or popcorn or gooseberries, or even stew. The labor costs are harder to calculate, but unlikely to tip the balance, especially since wheat and mutton are already byproducts of the compost cycle, so every decent village will have a bakery.
Solving the hunger problem in your village by mass-producing meat pies is easy and smart. Trying to feed the same amount of people by using a wide variety of less effiecient foods ... means more work and more time and more resources invested in fixing one problem. It isn't wrong to explore other food options, but it is a mistake to think it is a faster route.
also i thought there were 5 corn per corn plant, and 2 bites of popcorn per bowl, i'm not one to be obsessed with doing the math in this game, and I'm also not sure how one calculates the value of eating a carrot compared to its value for compost or mutton pie. It only takes two carrots to get like 21 soil. It's hardly going to kill a civ if some of them are eaten instead of using for that purpose.
No, I think you have your numbers mixed up. You get FOUR corn from each row and a bowl of popcorn gives FOUR bites per bowl. So if you eat a fresh ear of corn, it gives just 5 pips. But if you use that ear of corn to make popcorn, you get 12 pips total (3 pips x 4 bites). Or if you are aiming for yum, you feed four different people instead of just one. Processing the corn gives you more than double the value and lets you spread the yum to multiple people. But don't stop there ... if you instead use that corn to make whole milk, you can get a bucket of milk (or multiple buckets if you are a fast milker). Each bucket contains ten bowls of milk and EVERY bowl is 14 pips! That's 140 pips per bucket of whole milk. If the milk seperates, you get skim milk and butter. Skim milk only gives 8 pips per bowl, but there are still ten bowls in one bucket, so 80 pips (plus additional pips from buttered bread). That means that a single ear of fresh corn could be worth just five pips and feed one person to extend their yum chain by one point ... or it could be turned into milk and feed ten people for 140 pips (or more, if you gather more than one bucket before the cow dries up). At that point, any possible yum bonus doesn't matter. Even if you max out yum, you will never get more than 40 pip bonus from a single bite due to yum because there are not that many unique foods in the game. Most of the time you get a lot less than that, since maintaining a chain over 10 points gets increasingly hard.
There is a steep opportunity cost involved with eating low efficiency foods for yum. It might make your life a little easier by extending your personal yum chain, but there is a very real cost to the village, associated with eating basic foods that could be processed into better food. Like eating carrots and berries that should be reserved for making to compost so the village can produce better value foods, like pies and stew and milk.
Yum bonus is fun and useful for more experienced players, especially during old age, but you can't expect the majority of your village to understand yum chaining and eat responsibly. I don't think that even most of the people who do yum chaining really understand what they are doing and when they should eat what foods to maximize their pip values while minimizing waste. It is definitely NOT as simple as eating anything that you can find as long as it says YUM.
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