[1.3.3059] Flaw: food on traders is mostly meat, which makes no sense.

Started by Mihsan, July 14, 2021, 03:37:42 PM

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Mihsan

So it bothered me for a long time (since caravans became a thing perhaps) and it is still actual... Sorry if it is a bit rant'ey.

1. What the circumstances were:
Anything of the following: visiting any settlement, requesting any bulk goods caravan, checking bulk goods trading ship with the aim of buying some food.

2. What happened:
Every stock I check is always the same: most food that they sell is meat. Finding vegetables is extremely rare.

3. What you expected to happen:
Traders should have more vegetables and much less meat. Why? I suspect that it is just bad kind of random, which looks at list of all foods, sees that there are so much types of meats (about 60) against any other types of foods (6 types of vegetables) - so we get exactly this in trading tables (meats show up ~10 times more often than vegetables), so nobody just looked in to it.

And if you think about it: meat is terrible as trading goods. It is hard to store (requires freezing) and hard to transport (short time window to deliver and sell), so why all traders want to sell it? Also consider the player's experience: I suspect that regular player's colony will produce much more vegetables than meat and value meat much more, so vegetables will be sold a lot while meats will be saved... so why AI traders act so different from the player? Also, it affects gameplay in a bad way and leads to worse stories: like my colony is starving, but closest settlement is 3+ days away over the mountains and sells only meat... next one too... wait, where are all vegetables? Also consider how it affects carnivore/vegetarian meals and ideologies...

4. Check generation of trading goods on settlements, trading caravans, ships.
Pain, agony and mechanoids.

Pheanox

Thanks for the feedback request, I'll have the devs investigate to see if the balance should be tweaked.