Part 2: Interlude: Let's talk about good and bad recipes
Eeepies posted:
I can see why I wasn't good in this game, wow. That revenue blew everything I ever did out of the water. DDJ for me, and Mixed Casserole of Pork will be our family heirloom recipe.
Could you explain why exactly the four disastrous recipes are bad, for each of them? You spoke about long cooking times and low margins, are these a mixture of both or are their cooking times just too long to consider?
Finally, is there a snowball effect in this game? For example, is there a chance the latter missions get impossible if you don't start well early, or is every mission achievable no matter what?
Sure, no problem. I grabbed pictures of the recipe pages for the four bad recipes, as well as two good ones that people have asked me to put on the menu: the mixed casserole of pork and the poached salmon with truffles and shrimp.
Interlude: Let's talk about good and bad recipes
Mixed casserole of pork
This is our best recipe, the pork casserole. It has a rating of 58%, which is the highest of our recipes at the moment. Its profit margin is also excellent, at $12.59 every time we serve it.
Under "COOKING TIME", the game shows three clocks. Each recipe shows between one and five clocks under cooking time, but these are entirely meaningless. I put the recipe on the menu and watched Armand make it, and it took him about six seconds to make.
When the restaurant is reasonably busy at lunchtime and dinner time, Armand will spend every second cooking non-stop, so time is precious. Since the restaurant makes $12.59 on the mixed casserole and it takes Armand six seconds to make, you could say that the mixed casserole earns us $2.10 for every second spent cooking it.
Poached salmon with truffles and shrimp
Here is another good recipe, the poached salmon with truffles and shrimp. That sounds really delicious to me, but unfortunately the game rates this significantly lower than the pork casserole, at only 45% quality. This is fine at this stage of the game, but normally you'd phase this out later in the game once you start getting higher-quality recipes.
Looking at the cost and the default price, the default profit is $11.52, nearly as much as the mixed casserole. The cooking time is two clocks, which in this case is also around six seconds, so the poached salmon earns us $1.92 per second.
Chocolate tart
This is the chocolate tart. It's got a good rating of 51%, making it one of our highest quality recipes. The difference between the cost and the default price is only $4.74, though, so it makes significantly less money than the pork casserole and the poached salmon. That's OK, because desserts tend not to earn giant profits on their own.
The cooking time is two clocks, like the poached salmon, so you'd think that this takes the same amount of time to cook. This is a LIE. The chocolate tart in fact takes about 16 seconds for Armand to cook, nearly three times as long as the poached salmon which also showed two clocks under cooking time. With the recipe's gross profit of $4.74 over 16 seconds, the chocolate tart is earning our restaurant $0.30 per second, making the mixed casserole 600% more profitable. Essentially, Armand is just wasting his time when he's cooking this.
French apple tart
This is the apple tart, and I'm pretty sure it's the worst recipe in the entire game. Its quality is 39%, which is one of the lowest in the game. The gross profit is $5, and its cooking time is five clocks, which this time means about 23 seconds. Armand will be earning $0.22 per second while cooking this, and since the quality is so low it will also drag down our restaurant's rating. Fuck this recipe.
Dried bean casserole
This recipe looks deceptively good. The rating is kind of low, 45%, but that's acceptable for the start of the game. The gross profit is really good, a whopping $14.12, and the cooking time is three clocks, same as the mixed casserole. Unfortunately, the clocks lie! This actually takes about 16 seconds to cook, which means that you're earning $0.88 per second while also making a low quality dish. This is especially bad because main courses are usually highly profitable and very high quality, so any time someone orders this they will earn you less money, and they'll be dissatisfied with the low quality of the meal.
Stuffed peppers
This is a similar story to the dried bean casserole. It's slightly better, having a rating of 48% and a gross profit of $15.01. The cooking time of three clocks means 18 seconds this time around, making the profitability $0.83 per second. Since this is a main course, that's pretty bad.
I didn't want to go through all fourteen starting recipes in detail in the first post, but from now on every time we acquire a new recipe I'll show off its recipe page and briefly talk about it and whether or not it might be good or bad.