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[sionlife]

I am sure you have had a single prepared meal pot worth over 20,000. I a few pots can buy out a trade caravan. I propose an easy way to make prepared meal values more balanced is to remove the quality modifier for the separate ingredients but keep the quality modifier for the meal component itself. It makes intuitive sense because a chef's skill is in the way he combined the separate ingredients together so that the product is much more than the sum of the parts.

Taking the meal value calculation on the wiki: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.34:Cook#Prepared_Meal_Value
The example there gives the value of 770. If we use the idea above and forget about the quality modifiers on the ingredients we have:

(well-prepared = 2) x (base value of prepared meal = 10☼)
+
(value of cheese = 10☼)
+
(value of tripe = 2☼)
+
(value of sweetbread = 2☼)
+
(value of mussels = 2☼)

all multiplied by the total number of ingredients (11)
=
396☼

This is a bit better. The wiki example uses modest modifiers but in a real game where there are masterful modifiers knocking around, a pot of food can fetch very high prices.

[ShinQuickMan]

The bigger problem is the food stacks of doom, which can allow for ridiculous amounts of ingredients cooked in an unreasonably short time frame. This has only become more apparent ever since multi-tile fruit-growing trees became a thing.

[sionlife]

I don't know the problem you are talking about. I am taking a guess in that you mean each ingredient is a giant stack in and of itself and so the final multiplier in the calculation above is a huge number?

Maybe what you can do is instead of using a simple sum of ingredient quantities as the final multiplier, you use MAX(quantity of ingredient 1, quantity of ingredient 2, .....). So in the above example the new value becomes.

(well-prepared = 2) x (base value of prepared meal = 10☼)
+
(value of cheese = 10☼)
+
(value of tripe = 2☼)
+
(value of sweetbread = 2☼)
+
(value of mussels = 2☼)

all multiplied by largest stack size of any ingredient = 5 (for number of cow cheese)

=
180☼

Would this new change solve your problem?

[Manveru Taurënér]

Feels like the way to do it that makes the most sense would be to have the quality of ingredients affect the quality of the finished products, but not really affect any other calculations beyond that. That is, high/low quality ingredients raises/lowers the quality of the result same as a high/low skill level does, meshing it into all the things currently influencing the end product.

Bear in mind pretty much everything regarding value of items is a placeholder for now until the economy is reworked and reimplemented. The plan is to have supply/demand simulated, so values will be a whole lot more flexible, and there will likely not be any fine tuning of numbers until then. Hard to say how far off down the line that'll be, maybe 5 years or so guesstimatively?

"Then we'll do myth and magic additions until we reach a satisfactory point (some options below, we won't get to everything). After the artifact and magic releases, we'll do a lot of foundational work culminating in starting scenarios for your fortresses. These changes touch upon law, property, status, diplomacy and so on, which will position us for economic work..."

[Tristan Alkai]

I don't know the problem you are talking about. I am taking a guess in that you mean each ingredient is a giant stack in and of itself and so the final multiplier in the calculation above is a huge number?

Maybe what you can do is instead of using a simple sum of ingredient quantities as the final multiplier, you use MAX(quantity of ingredient 1, quantity of ingredient 2, .....). So in the above example the new value becomes.

(well-prepared = 2) x (base value of prepared meal = 10☼)
+
(value of cheese = 10☼)
+
(value of tripe = 2☼)
+
(value of sweetbread = 2☼)
+
(value of mussels = 2☼)

all multiplied by largest stack size of any ingredient = 5 (for number of cow cheese)

=
180☼

Would this new change solve your problem?

As things stand now, cooking meals combines a number of food stacks into a single larger stack that is the sum of its parts.  No food is produced or lost in the process. 

In your suggestion, cooking would reduce the quantity of food available, possibly to a very significant degree.  I do agree that the value of prepared meals is too high, but this is not the way to do it. 

My preference would be to apply quality modifiers when the ingredients are produced, then import them into the prepared meal.  Getting to high meal values then takes several different dwarves at high skill levels, rather than the current one cook.