Food, Diet, Culture, And Elites

Cultural dishes and cultural osmosis in Axioms

Introduction

One of the core distinctions between Axioms and other strategy games is the deconstruction of culture from a one word identifier to an actual social system. Since the last post was on crafting I thought that talking about the dietary aspect of culture was an excellent followup since “cooking” is basically “crafting with food”. The next post will be an overview of culture and how central the idea is to Axioms.

Food is an important part of culture and it is also part of the narrative of “civilization” vs “barbarity”. Food is also a crucial aspect of class differentiation and conflict. I want to be clear that players can totally ignore the food system, in most cases, if they aren’t interested in engaging with it. Indeed from a roleplay perspective many characters would be uninterested in it and the majority of NPCs will have little focus or expertise related to it. Nevertheless both as a personal interest and as part of a political program food can be used as a tool to create change or maintain power.

Major Food Types

Firstly Axioms has a list of food/meal/dish types. There are things like pies, noodles, sandwiches, stews, soups, sides, deserts, breakfests, meat cuts, salads, and so on.

These are all composed out of a variety of ingredients, similar to an herbal remedy or an alchemical product. Cooking uses the same systems from a programming perspective as well. Preperation(rather than processing) verbs, input nouns like heat or cold, and so on.

Each dish/meal has a descriptive title and a cultural title. So salad with lettuce, tomatoes, and chicken vs a procedurally generated noun in front of salad. Gooseleaf Salad or something. I imagine some people will care for one over the other.

Different cultures will have different preferred major food types like meat pies vs fruit salads, typically with a few major food types per population, and several “cultural ingredients” like peppers or grains or fish or w/e.

Provisions, Politics, Popularity, And Population

This cultural food system will build upon the existing backbone of food preferences for ingredients as discussed in previous posts. Access to both “cultural ingredients” and to preferred major food types will, as discussed in the blog post linked below, be an important part of your popularity with local populations and characters.

Populations, Politics, Luxuries, Food, And Amenities

For obvious reasons you’d often expect populations that lived near each other to share similar food culture, due to the resources available and due to spillover and intermingling between the groups. For rulers who care to engage, or for merchants, or for any other character archetype, properly knowing about and utilizing food culture is a way to make friends, boost support, and in some cases manipulate things to create harmony or hatred between groups.

For Social Occasions you could, if you could be bothered, source relevant dishes for important guests, popularize new ingredients and innovations among the elites, which often filters down the social order, or even slight or insult people you disliked.

Interface Issues

Because Axioms uses many procedurally generated resources on top of a core set of handdefined ones, roughly 200 premade and 800 newly generated per worl, dishes/meals will use “composite icons” in the interface. They’ll be composed of the type of dish and the 3 most important ingredients. This type of “composite icon” will also be used in other places where relevant and in some cases it will be used until a more advanced/powerful image generation system can be decided on and developed. One example is Character portraits/icons.

Conclusion

Food is an integral part of any culture or society and it has had important historical implications and impacts in our own world. Since Axioms already has a resource system, a crafting system similar to cooking, and uses more standard food mechanics related to happiness and so forth, it was an obvious choice to more deeply integrate a flexible and dynamic food system into other parts of the game. For most games you’d need to program so many mechanics from the ground up to add the value of the “cultural food” mechanics but Axioms is already built on a strong, detailed, and flexible foundation so it requires only a couple interfaces, a moderate amount of AI work, and a very limited amount of actual “workhorse functions” to be programmed to gain quite a bit of value.