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What this country needs... is a whole lot of things, but one of the biggies is cheap "all protein" meal.

When the Admins, in their infinite wisdom (that was sarcasm) decided to dump Diamonds and Gifts and give us Titanium and Helicopters, they eliminated one of the ways in which we could regain health for a relatively low price in Gold and money. Amongst the cynical - like just about all of us - this was seen as a big real world cash grab. The only way to heal effectively in a place without a hospital was to spend 0.5 Gold to get 20 health. That meant that, with the average haul from a treasure map being 5 Gold, you could heal 10 times in a 30 day work period, and since fighting had a much larger cost in terms of health that meant either spending your savings, not fighting or spending real cash. Oh, and did I mention the bug that has apparently prevented at least some CPs from placing hospitals? I didn't think I did.

Recently the Admins gave in - somewhat - to player protests of the unfairness of it all. Health gained from House quintupled (great if you own a house that gives you 10 health) and players were allowed to eat more than once, at the cost of not eating automatically. So you buy the food you need to top you off or restore you to fighting trim and off you go. There have even been articles telling us that the right food to eat is Q2 based on price per point. But there doesn't seem to be any food that doesn't have a certain number of points devoted to Happiness.

The problem as I see it is that the existing companies were built on a model in which the player automatically ate every day and needed to replace Health and Happiness with each meal. We are now dealing with a new model, one in which some of the meals that are being consumed are devoted entirely to upgrading Health. In some cases the Happiness will be lost because the citizen has 100 Happiness. Those are points that the player is paying for but which do him no good.

The obvious answer is the "all protein meal." That is a food course that devotes all of the points to Health. Currently there aren't to many meals like this available on the Canadian market. I have found one Q1 company that offers 30 Health/0 Happiness at $2.02, a cost of $0.067 per health point. By comparison a Q2 meal, delivering the same 30 Health and 30 Happiness costs $1, or $0.033 per Health point. There is a Q3 Company offering 90 Health/0 happiness for $3.60, or $0.04 per Health Point. Sounds better than what the Q1 company is offering,but when you consider that a Q5 company delivers 100 Health and 50 Happiness for $3.80, $0.038 per Health Point.

Let's turn our thoughts back to that Q2 company - the one that produces the 30/30 food for $1. Now let's assume that the cost of producing 60 Health points and 0 Happiness points is the same as doing the 30/30 and the company would sell it for the same price. That would make the price of 1 Health point $0.017. To put it another way that would be $0.166 to increase your health from 70 to 71. What did we used to pay for gifts again?

I think that the "all protein meal" - health food if you want - has the potential to be a huge growth industry, provided that you've got the 40G+ to start up a company.