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sugar vs caffeine

Posted: Sat Oct 16, 2010 10:13 am
by Ryme
Didn't want to derail an advice thread to talk about this stuff, but did want to talk about this a little.
cristiona wrote:Actually, sugar's a little underpowered.
prestige wrote:Honestly, the decaf restriction should be worth 3 times the mettle of the diet restriction. Decaf (along with no items) is one of the few restrictions that has a really big impact on your daycount.
Yeah, sugar is intentionally a secondary food. Not only because that's kind of how it works in real life, but because it was tacked onto the game much later. I don't ever see it as being as useful for pure turn generation as caffeine is.

That said, I think there's a lot of room for growth for sugar, even in the near future. I'd like to see it have a lot more secondary benefits. More sugars with useful buffs, XP gain, stat gain, things like that. Caffeine has some of that now, and sugar doesn't yet, but that sort of thing is definitely coming. And particularly since it's a fairly small fullness meter, I can make those benefits pretty good without really throwing things out of balance.

Of the two categories of food, sugar is also the most likely of the two to get some sort of ability to regain fullness that's already been used. (A kind of once-a-day super insulin pill, say?) No promises on that, but if I ever do it, it's almost guaranteed to apply to sugar rather than caffeine.

Re: sugar vs caffeine

Posted: Sat Oct 16, 2010 6:58 pm
by Cristiona
Prestige wrote:It would be nice if for example the pinata candies were at least slightly better than eyeball gumballs.
Or more generous. The last pinata I burst this run gave me one gingerette hard candy. One. I don't expect to get a whole day out of a pinata, but only scoring one piece was kinda lame.

Re: sugar vs caffeine

Posted: Sun Oct 17, 2010 2:39 am
by Strlikecrazy
Ryme wrote:That said, I think there's a lot of room for growth for sugar, even in the near future. I'd like to see it have a lot more secondary benefits. More sugars with useful buffs, XP gain, stat gain, things like that. Caffeine has some of that now, and sugar doesn't yet, but that sort of thing is definitely coming. And particularly since it's a fairly small fullness meter, I can make those benefits pretty good without really throwing things out of balance.
I've never worried about sugar being 'underpowered', as i've always seen it similar to spleen items in KoL. Your idea here, however, would be awesome. I mentioned in the idea thread about a coffee machine giving benefical caffeine items, but sugar items with effects would be much better.

And as Crist said, more sugar dropping in the 7-11 zones would be great.

Re: sugar vs caffeine

Posted: Sun Oct 17, 2010 3:02 am
by Cristiona
Well, I never advocated for parity. My complaint was just the size of the gap. The gap gets highlighted with retcon, because of mettle suddenly putting values on things.

Re: sugar vs caffeine

Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2010 10:51 pm
by Cristiona
Thinking about this while looking at the sweet pods I scavenged during the level 10 quest.
Ryme wrote:More sugars with useful buffs, XP gain, stat gain, things like that.
HP and PP restoration could be added to the mix. Hell, candy with healing attached would probably be very, very, very popular, and a nice balance to caffeine's ability to generate turns.

Re: sugar vs caffeine

Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2010 6:24 am
by NardoLoopa
What might be interesting is sugar with +PP and +MaxPP at the same time for 5 min or something. Kinda sugar rush effect where your mind races -- but only for a second. Imagine being lvl 3 and having a max PP of 20 and eating a +50PP sugar item that puts you at 70PP for 1 turn. Might have interesting implications for big-cost skills.

Might also be interesting to introduce some very large cost skills that can't be cast in run w/o the use of something like this. For example, a skill that cost 200PP to cast, but the likely max PP in run is less that 100PP. You'd have to eat a sugar to cast it. Anyway, might be interesting.

Re: sugar vs caffeine

Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2010 6:48 am
by Cristiona
NardoLoopa wrote:What might be interesting is sugar with +PP and +MaxPP at the same time for 5 min or something. Kinda sugar rush effect where your mind races -- but only for a second. Imagine being lvl 3 and having a max PP of 20 and eating a +50PP sugar item that puts you at 70PP for 1 turn.
I already know exactly how I'd use such a thing:

Get XP to level.
Cast buffs.
Eat super-sugar.
Actually level.
Have 50 extra PP to top up buffs.