[BOK] I don't buy Q5 food. Neither should you.

Day 910, 04:46 • Published in Netherlands Belgium • by Boklevski

Here's the file it's all about (if you want to skip reading the whole thing): CLICK FOR FILE (excel file, available for download)
Look up your wellness (approximately), the quality of your house and the quality of the company you work at. Then, you can see the cheapest solution: buy the FOOD and GIFTS that you need.

Some thoughts about food, gifts, houses and WELLNESS.

The last months, I used to buy Q3 food. Having a Q5 house and a job at a Q5 company, my wellness would slowly decrease, but I bought gifts from time to time to compensate for that. However, prices of Q3 food went from 3,50 NLG to 4,50 NLG lately, and that’s when I started wondering: should I still buy Q3 food, or are there cheaper solutions?

Well… there is indeed a cheaper solution. The current price of Q2 food makes it cheaper to buy Q2 food and gifts to compensate for what I get less in wellness gain. Dear Q3 food producers: you just lost a customer because of the price increase. And to make it even worse: if you are a producer of Q4 or Q5 food, you can consider yourself LUCKY (or your customers STUPID) if you sell anything!

Quick example: If you have a Q5 house and job, and you have 90 wellness, you can compensate for the wellness loss of training and working by eating Q4 food (8.13 NLG). However, it would be way cheaper to eat Q1 food (0.99 NLG) and buy two Q1 gifts (2.80 NLG per gift) and thus spend total just 6.59 NLG.

Okay, probably clear for the example. But what if you don’t have a Q5 job? Or you don’t have a Q5 house? Or you want a wellness of 100? Then you should click this link. It’s a link to an excel file on google docs, which you can download (so you can see all formulas and stuff I did). And yeah, of course it’s free…

In the sheet “Output”, you can look into the right table (for the wellness you have and want to keep). Look up the House Quality you have (HQ..) and the Work Quality (WQ…). Then, you’ll find the different qualities of Food you can buy (F1 – F5), the Gifts that you would need to compensate for your wellness loss by working and training, and the total costs (Food + Gifts).

Note that the cost are calculated when the following prices applied in the UNL:
Foo😛 Q1 - 0.99 NLG; Q2 - 2.31 NLG; Q3 - 4.50 NLG; Q4 - 8.13 NLG; Q5 - 11.02 NLG
Gifts: Q1 - 2.80 NLG; Q2 - 6.09 NLG; Q3 - 18.90 NLG. (As the price per wellness point increase is highest for Q1 gifts, I have only used that in the calculations.)

For example:
Looking into the column of Wellness 100. If you have no House (HQ0) and a job in a Quality 1 company (WQ1), it is cheapest to buy F2 + 0.96 Gifts. That means, you should buy Q2 food and 1 gift to stay on 100 wellness.
(* Note that the price of 0.96 gifts is used, assuming that you don’t need to buy a gift every ( 1 / 1 – 0.96 = ) 25 days. In this case a bit a “bad” example, but if you would need 0.5 gift, you only have to buy one gift every 2 days.)

Assumptions that are made in the file:
* You eat food every day (quite obvious, as otherwise you'll die and you probably don't care about this game and file anyway).
* You work every day.
* You train every day (when you're less than a two-clicker, you probably don't care about the file either).
* Current wellness is the wellness before you work + train (used for wellness points multiplier).
* Gifts can be used "partly", meaning that if you need 0.25 gifts, you'll have to buy one gifts every 4 days.
* The sheet calculates the amount of gifts based on what you need to compensate for wellness loss (so no "getting better", just staying the same).

Describing the file shortly
Okay, I’ll go through the file very quick, so you can make adjustments etc. as you want if you’re a bit handy with Excel. You might need Excel2007 (at least that want I created it in, so don’t know if it works for older versions).

In the sheet "Input", all the formulas are stored. In row 11 is the “basic” formula, based on what’s taken from eRep Wiki (see row 3 and 5). Prices of FOOD and GIFTS are in column P to S. Prices of HOUSES are not taken into account as this is a one-time investment (until V2, that is).

In rows 13 to 17, I don’t use the formula to calculate the wellness increase, but – based on the required wellness increase due to work + train –, I calculate for the different kinds of food how many gifts you would need to stay on the same wellness (basically turning the formula around). You’ll need to put in your wellness, Q house, Q work, train Y/N and Quality food in cells E20:E24. In fact, those differ for everybody. That’s where Excel’s Scenarios come in!

Using different scenarios for Current Wellness (10, 20, 30, …, 100), for Q house (Q0 to Q5), Q work (Q1 to Q5) and Q food (Q1 to Q5), I have Excel calculate the required amount of GIFTS to stay on the same wellness, and the total costs of the FOOD and GIFTS using a Pivot Table in the Scenario Summary. This is on the second worksheet. To make things a bit more readable, I copied everything into the Output sheet.

If you know how to deal with it, you can change the prices of food and gifts and rerun the Scenario Summary. Or you could adjust the formulas, calculate what’s needed when you don’t train, etc. Just play along as you like!

Have fun,
Boklevski