Gluttony mechanics and a complementary humour raising systemThis is a suggestion to improve the current gluttony system which I think would be more appealing. First, I must admit that the gluttony system as it is now, does not necessarily needs to be changed (it isn't flawed much) in my opinion but I would still like to see some changes to it. I must say I prefer that it is not changed to ressemble the inspirational system.
My first complain is about how I feel when my character is in the gluttony mode. I remember asking myself why would eating like 4-5 food items in a row increase your humour by 1 mere point (for the bar that reached the top) resetting the whole other bars to 0 once one humour point is gained. That sure does not "feel right", my character should still be having food in his stomach and yet it is as if I just started to eat with all my bars to 0. And then thinking, ok what should I eat next and in what order. It feels like you are on a diet and that you have to plan what you are eating. It thus feels less like gluttony where you would essentially eat everything in sight for your humours to increase.
My second complain has already been mentionned by wildone, the penality for having different humour levels is too harsh in my opinion. There should be some penality based on the spread level of humours and that penality would increase as the spread increases thus avoiding large difference in stats. I think pretty much everyone (at least in the end-game) has roughly the same level of humours in all 4 since that is the optimized way of increasing the humours. A character oriented toward combat would have a similar humour distribution than that of a scholar or crafstman where I would expect higher blood and yellow bile for the first and phlegm and black bile for the second. I would like to see more diversity in player builds or at least not be too much penalized for having some spread in humour levels. The player builds and balance are a somewhat different issue however.
Another complain is regarding the casual player and new players to the game. A lot of things needs to be learned in salem in order to have an idea of what to do and how to do it. The gluttony system is something that can be hard for the newcomer to grasp early in the game (I remember playing the first 5 hours not really knowing how to raise the humours, or the rules I should follow in doing so). My suggestion regarding this is similar to one that already has been mentionned (
http://forum.salemgame.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=637&p=6308). I will elaborate it further in the complementary system for humour raising section.
So in order to address both of these issues, I came up with an idea for a different gluttony mechanic.
In this model increasing your humour does not increase by 1.0 each time one humour bar reaches the maximum humour you currently have and then resets all the other bars. The maximum humour would instead increase by pushing the bars beyond their respective actual threshold (Fractions like 0.1 are allowed). Initially the first few food items eaten would fill up the current bar (as it is now) and yield 0 to your maximum capacity. Once a bar reaches full, any extra left over would go past the current maximum capacity (I will call that the overflow). Now this overflow determines how much you gain at each time tick in your maximum of that particular humour (Overflow * Gain_Factor). All humour could be raised at the same time, this process happens to all humour bars. There would still be an invariance penality that is reducing your bars overtime and therefore you want to fight that and keep your bars above your current maximum during the whole gluttony process in order for your max humour to increase for each time tick. (A time tick refers to the smallest increment of time when food is eaten in gluttony mode.)
In summary the proposed changes would:
- Leave the current system of food consumption and humour raising value of food items intact. (No changes needed to them.)
- Allow for fractional increase in humour in all 4 bars at the same time.
- Be more intuitive. (Trying to push your humour bars beyond their actual maximum by eating) and (Seeing the bars actually go over your current maximum (overflow)). They transfer part of the overflow to the current maximum which increases slightly for each time tick.
- Give a better feeling that you are engaged in a gluttony mode. Eating basically everything in sight until no food is left. (Some planning is still required if you want to optimize the gain, but not as much as it is now.)
I toyed with some formulas and created some mathematical models that have the characteristics I have stated. I would be more than happy to share it with the devs if they find these ideas interesting.
The formula for the next increase in humour threshold goes essentially like this:
A =
AverageHumour +
PenalityForSpreadWhere
A is the level you need your bars to reach before starting to increase your maximum.
AverageHumour is (Blood + Phlegm + Yellow Bile + Black Bile)/4, and
PenalityForSpread is a penality that increases the more your 4 humours are different from each other (the details are a bit cumbersome). The formula uses adjustable parameters which make it easy to fine tune to ones need.
About the balancing of characters maximum humours and such, it is a problem that is closely related to the purity system as a whole (forageables and agriculture in particular) and I will post some ideas about it in another topic. Any change to the gluttony system to achieve game balance is pointless for the moment if the purity system is still to be changed and implemented.
Complementary humour raising systemI think it would be good to have some sort of alternative way of raising humour at the beginning of the game. That would be based on which humour is drained, the more you drain a certain humour (by performing an action that drains it), the higher the maximum humour increases until some soft cap like 25-30. To go past this point you have to familiarize yourself with the gluttony system and start using it if you did not already. Your humour maximum would increase faster at low max-humour levels and increase slowly as you approach the soft cap. I do not think there would be a botting issue there since you still need to eat in order to heal the drained bars and also, there is not much point into botting since you will reach this cap pretty fast and it is easily reached with the gluttony system. It is just to give new players time to figure other things out before having to think about and understand the gluttony mechanics.
Please comment and I will answer my best if you have questions about the system I am proposing.
